Hour of Power

On February 8, 1970, a Reformed Church in America pastor named Robert Schuller put his own Sunday service on television for the first time, broadcasting from Garden Grove Community Church on KTLA, a single Los Angeles station. Nothing quite like it had been attempted before: not a taped religious program built for television, but an actual weekly worship service, hymns, sermon and all, carried live to a home audience the way a football game or a news broadcast might be. It is generally described as the first televised church service in American broadcast history.

The broadcast did not stay local for long. Within a year Hour of Power had spread to stations well beyond Southern California and, before the decade was out, was reaching audiences on five continents. Schuller built the Crystal Cathedral, a glass sanctuary in Garden Grove, largely to give the growing broadcast a physical home worthy of its television audience, and Hour of Power began originating from its glass walled sanctuary in the early 1980s. At its peak the program drew more than twenty million viewers worldwide, built on Schuller's own upbeat, positive thinking oriented preaching style.

Schuller stepped back from regular hosting around 2010, and the Crystal Cathedral congregation went through a widely reported bankruptcy and change of ownership in the years that followed. Hour of Power outlasted the building: the broadcast was relaunched in 2021 with Schuller's grandson Bobby Schuller in the pulpit, drawing viewers from nearly twenty countries to its first new broadcast and continuing, more than half a century after that first Sunday on KTLA, the format Robert Schuller had improvised almost by accident.