Robert H. Schuller

Robert Harold Schuller (born September 16, 1926, near Alton, Iowa; died April 2, 2015) was an American televangelist, pastor of the Reformed Church in America, and author who built one of the twentieth century’s largest media ministries on a single idea he branded “Possibility Thinking.” After arriving in southern California, he and his wife Arvella began a congregation in 1955 with about $500, famously preaching from the rooftop snack bar of a Garden Grove drive-in theater so that people could attend in their cars.

That congregation grew into the Garden Grove Community Church and, in 1980, into the glass-walled Crystal Cathedral. His television program, the Hour of Power, launched in 1970 and at its 1990s peak reached an estimated audience in the tens of millions across roughly 180 countries, making him for decades one of the most-watched preachers in the world.

(The ministry later entered bankruptcy and the Crystal Cathedral property was sold in 2011-2012.) Schuller’s significance in the Atlas is as the figure who took Norman Vincent Peale’s “positive thinking” and recast it as “possibility thinking” — a relentlessly applied, goal-oriented, self-esteem-centered Christianity.

Where Peale (his acknowledged mentor) emphasized a confident mental attitude, Schuller pushed toward action on impossible-seeming dreams: refusing the word “impossible,” interrogating a goal until it became a plan, and “beginning by beginning.” He fused New Thought-style mental causation, applied psychology (a “theology of self-esteem”), and mainstream Protestant faith into a mass-market, telegenic package.

He is the bridge between Peale’s mid-century positive thinking and the later self-esteem-driven, aspirational megachurch style (e.g. Joel Osteen), and a popularizer of the broader New Thought conviction that belief and expectancy reshape what a person attempts and achieves.