The LA Times reported that about 200 congregants filled about half of one AMC theater at the Outlets of Orange Shopping center. Sheila and a handful of her Crystal Cathedral followers are starting with no money, no place to call home and no financing. In fact, they collected their offering in Popcorn buckets according to LA Times.
“Today is a birth day,” Sheila Schuller Coleman told her new congregation at Hope Center of Christ. “We’re birthing something new, and it brings up so many memories…. This is a much bigger crowd than Dad had.”
“We are going to learn how to be a strong church,” said Schuller Coleman, who was 4 when her father started his famous ministry. “We’re not about a church building. We are about building a church.”
One congregant said the service went to the heart of what a church is about.
“You have to decide what’s more important — the people or the edifice,” said David Lewis, 69, who followed Schuller Coleman from the Crystal Cathedral, where she announced March 11 that she was leaving the ministry. The pastor’s announcement came one day after her parents resigned from the Crystal Cathedral board.