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“The Crystal Cathedral Ministries, the assets and the buildings, would still be in the hands of the ministries if my father would have simply walked away,” said Schuller during the webcast hosted by Leadership Network on Tuesday. “When I accepted the role as the next senior pastor he had agreed to be an ambassador-at-large and raise funds for the endowment fund. He didn’t do that. He became a sounding board for my sisters and other people that didn’t particularly care for the new direction for whatever reason.

 

“There’s no question in my mind whatsoever,” he added, talking about the founding pastor of the church, his 86-year-old father, Robert H. Schuller, “had I been given the proper authority and all of the responsibility I had, and had my father simply turned to those that came to them and said, ‘I don’t have anything to do with that anymore’ that it would have been a very, very successful transition because we did lots of things very right.”

Schuller, 58, explained that the Crystal Cathedral local congregation merged with the Crystal Cathedral Ministries, that included the television broadcast, “Hour of Power,” several years ago. Schuller was the lead pastor of the church and president of the broadcast ministry from 2006 to 2008. Last January, Crystal Cathedral’s board of directors voted to make Bobby Schuller, the grandson of founder Robert H. Schuller, the new pastor for the weekly “Hour of Power” television program as well as a non-voting member of the board.

The ministry filed for bankruptcy in October 2010 and in February 2012 sold the iconic building and its adjacent campus to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange for future use as the diocese’s new cathedral. According to the terms of the sale, the building and most of the campus will continue to be used by the ministry for up to three years before being renovated for use as a Catholic cathedral.