![]() Disneyland had just opened a couple miles down the road from the Orange, in Anaheim the entire area was developing rapidly. An early advertisement announced the new ministry's appeal: "The Orange Church meets in the Orange Drive-In Theater where even the handicapped, hard of hearing, aged and infirm can see and hear the entire service without leaving their family car."Īs the Schullers embraced their makeshift new venue, the congregation, in turn, came to embrace them. The architecture and technological system built for entertainment could be repurposed, hacked even, to deliver a religious ceremony for the golden age of the car. The efficiencies of the venue were obvious: For cinematic purposes, the drive-in was useful only in the darkness, which meant that it could play an effortlessly dual role, theater by night and church by day. So he set his sights on the tenth: the Orange Drive-In Theatre. Researching the matter further, however, Schuller discovered that the first nine of those options were already in use for other purposes. While making the trip from Illinois, driving on Route 66, the reverend took to a napkin and listed 10 sites that could host his budding ministry. The young couple were to start a ministry in California for that, they needed to find a venue that would host their notional congregation. In 1955, the Reformed Church in America gave a grant of $500 to Reverend Schuller and his wife Arvella. And the origins of the Crystal Cathedral, for all its shine and swagger, are more garage than skyscraper. In that, the Cathedral also seems symbolic of its times.īut if a church is a kind of technology - of media, of communication, of community - then it's fitting that even a megachurch would have a humble startup story. Today, the church ministry announced that the congregation will be moving its services a smaller building, a currently Catholic church, a mile down the road from the Cathedral's compound. The Crystal Cathedral has been in the news most recently for its financial troubles - culminating in bankruptcy, a controversial shift in the the church's leadership structure, and, finally, the sale of the Cathedral itself to a neighboring (Catholic) diocese. It's been at once a place of worship and a TV studio. If Christianity exists to be spread, the Cathedral has existed to do that spreading. ![]() From the church's soaring, sunlit pulpit, the charismatic preacher Reverend Robert Schuller spoke to a sea of worshippers - not just to congregants in the cavernous room itself, his image amplified by a JumboTron, but also, eventually, to a much wider audience via the church's iconic Hour of Power reality show. The structure is neither crystal nor, technically, a cathedral, but it's acted as an archetype for a 20th century phenomenon: the Christian megachurch. The Crystal Cathedral rises like a spaceship out of an impossibly green lawn in Garden Grove, Orange County, California. The interior pulpit of the Crystal Cathedral ( Wikimedia Commons)
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