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Robert H. Schuller
Harper San Francisco, 544 pages, $26

When I first picked up Robert Schuller's massive autobiography detailing his trajectory from Iowa farm boy to American icon, I wasn't at all sure I was going to like him.

I admit from the get-go that the avuncular evangelist for "possibility thinking" deserves respect for the sheer audacity of his accomplishments. How many American clergy lead a 10,000-member church on a 40-acre campus? How many preach in a building paneled with more than 10,000 windows that contains a world-class organ and a stream running down the middle aisle, for Pete's sake?

Surely no one would have predicted such a spectacular phenomenon when the Reformed Church of America pastor arrived in Orange County, California, more than 45 years ago with $500 in assets to start a mission congregation amid the unreached people groups of the West Coast.

The septuagenarian's keen ability to ride the wave of popular psychology and sincere desire to make the Good News something easily grasped made him a magnet. First he attracted Southern Californians, then viewers of his Hour of Power all over the country, people put off by the status quo traditionalism of many American mainline congregations in the mid-20th century.

Schuller has lived a life free from public scandal, aside from an altercation with a flight attendant in the mid-'90s (about where to hang his clergy robe—an incident not mentioned in the book). My Journey is an upbeat, uniquely American mix of "farm boy makes good" and "God helps those who help themselves." While he avoids malicious gossip or attacks on his theological opponents, Schuller doesn't prod the conscience or even awaken the mind to go deeper in understanding the mysteries of sin, suffering, and redemption.

In recounting the occasional attack on his positivist theology or his "edifice complex," Schuller responds with a restrained incredulity: How could they be cynical about somebody so obviously well intentioned?

"You can go anywhere from nowhere. My life is witness to that. I was born at the dead end of a dirt road that had no name and no number—in a flood" is a pretty vivid evocation of the American dream. That's where Schuller begins his story, right in America's heartland.

The youngest of five children, Robert Harold Schuller was raised in what apparently was an undemonstrative but close-knit and loving farm family in which a stoic mother ruled the home, raising the children to obey authority and respect the strict piety of the Dutch Reformed Church.

It is hard not to speculate that Schuller's desire to preach "comfort religion" was driven at least in part by his desire for the approval of his mother, Jennie: "Never would I hear the words I wanted more than anything to hear: 'I'm proud of you, Bob.' I'm sure that she was proud of her one child who became a Dominee [cleric]. After all, for her this meant returning the family to its honorable roots. But affirmation and affection were emotions that she seldom expressed. After all, pride was a sin."

Jennie's younger brother, Henry, was a missionary to China. Four weeks before Schuller's fifth birthday, his vocation was set. With an authority that resonated deep in the young Schuller's heart, Henry declared that the little boy who loved fishing and daydreaming would someday be a preacher. Many years later, as a young just-ordained minister starting out in Ivanhoe, Illinois, Schuller found out that his own working-class father had dreamed of being a preacher himself.

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August 5 2002, Vol. 46, No. 9