Revenge of the 80somethings

I’ve been fascinated watching the 80something Bob Schuler Senior expel his “younger generation” son these last few weeks. As most of us know, grandpa Schuler, now in his 80’s dumped the younger 50something Schuler overboard a few weeks ago and took over command again. The senior Schuler won’t preach but will serve as host while farming out the preaching to “America’s great communicators” like Bill Hybels, Juan Carlos Ortiz, John Maxwell, Luis Palau, Lee Strobel, and others.

Here is a curious new kind of worship revolution—the old-timers tossing overboard the “emergent” middle agers and taking back the church. Usually the younger generation wrests the church away from the oldtimers. The younger Schuler had new ideas and new methods, like using more Bible, giving more emphasis to the gospel and providing a smidgen less entertainment and pop psychology. The older Schuler will return to his tried and true recipe that made the program grow: appeasing the grayheads with more time for the choir, orchestra, the organ and a positive uplifting environment with less negative atonement kind of stuff and a lighter fare for the harder times.

Last week John Maxwell was his first “best of the best” communicators. He did his running-a-lap sermon and Maxwell is seldom a disappointing communicator. Ken Duncan was up this week but his routine was a weak second-rate performance. At least with rotation we won’t have to listen to the same weak speaker two weeks in a row (I doubt we will hear Duncan again).

I don’t think this scheme will work. It is the beginning of the end for the Schuler Empire. I bet we will see the gradual demise of Schuler religio-industry. Son-Schuler will get another church where they want more Bible and Calvary and he will disappear into the crowd with the rest of us. Poppa Schuler will stay visible for a while as he presides over the gradual demise of his TV program. Eventually the TV program will disappear and the Crystal Cathedral will become just another point of interest church-of-the-past like Rex Humbart’s church. (I bet most of my readers wouldn’t even know where to go to see the church building of the first of America’s famous weekly TV preachers). Schuler’s actual congregation is made up of 450 members—no mighty congregation even now. Like many of TV’s so-called great churches it is “a short man with a long shadow.” Future TV programs will increasingly be filled with desperate pleas for money until they drop stations one at a time and quietly disappear. Some faithful oldster-listeners will die and leave their estates to the senior Schuler and that will temporarily delay the demise, but it won’t stop it. I’m expecting to see a slow slide of both the TV program and the church into quiet oblivion. It is a story retold a thousand times over in every denomination.

TV ministries are to the general church as the stock market is to Main Street—a fiscal collapse hits the stock market and TV churches first, before rippling to Main Street and the beltway churches. And when money gets tight people start pointing fingers. The malcontents blame all the recent-changes-they-didn’t-like. So a churchful of older folk will naturally say, “If we can just get back to what made us great in the first place we’ll be OK again.”

Of course the world changes. Younger generations aren’t hungry for what’s offered on the Crystal Cathedral menu. But there are plenty of aging folk who yearn for church the way it used to be. I suspect the Crystal Cathedral (and the Hour of Power) will increasingly deliver church just like the pre-nursing home crowd wants it. When that generation disappears that church will disappear too. I doubt this distresses God at all. He is prompting new churches to be born every week that are designed for the current and coming generations. God seldom stays in one box for very long—even when the box is made of glass.

But what I’m wondering is this: To what extent will the Schuler story be played out in hundreds of less-famous churches in the coming decade—maybe your church? Will the oldsters foment a counter-revolution and toss out the most recent innovations-they-really-never-liked? Rather than octogenarians leading this counter-revolution will it be boomers who follow Papa Schuler’s model as they return their churches to the 80’s style they still love so much (and still call “contemporary”)? When the money gets tight will these senior-Boomers toss overboard the younger folk and their methods and bid them good riddance? And, if you are in that younger generation what will you do?

So what do you think?

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Keith Drury December 2, 2008