“There’s always been a caution against nepotism in all kinds of work,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Why shouldn’t it also extend to Christian ministries?”

On Sunday, Pastor Sheila Schuller Coleman appeared for apparently the last time before some 800 people at the morning service of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif.

For members of the extended Schuller family who had built and shepherded the iconic megachurch into the spiritual home for 10,000 members, so much had changed:

• Faced with staggering debts and a bankruptcy filing, the glass building was recently sold to the local Catholic diocese, but can remain Protestant in the short term.

• The staff had dropped from 350 to 200, including the recent firings of Coleman’s sister, husband and brother-in-law, who had all worked on its Hour of Power broadcasts.

• Just the day before, her parents, Robert H. and Arvella Schuller, had departed the ministry they started more than 50 years ago, citing a multimillion-dollar fight with its board.

As members of the Schuller family head in new directions — Coleman and brother-in law Jim Penner plan to start a new church this Sunday — the famous glass-walled church offers a cautionary tale of the potential pitfalls facing family-run ministries.

“If you have a family ministry, the health of the relationships within the family is key to whether the governance of the ministry is going to work well or not,” said the Rev. Wes Granberg-Michaelson, a former board member and former general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, the denomination of the Crystal Cathedral.

Granberg-Michaelson said the turning point for the ministry came when the family disputed who should take the reins of leadership as Robert H. Schuller prepared to step back as the public face of the ministry. Initially, Schuller wanted to see his son, Robert A. Schuller, take his place, and passed on the mantle of senior pastor in 2006.

Within two years, the younger Schuller left after he and his father could not agree on the ministry’s future direction. The next year, Coleman was chosen to handle administrative duties.

“I think that Robert A. could have carried that ministry and could have continued it,” said Granberg-Michaelson. “I also think that it would have been possible to find a person from the outside that would make that a mission-driven ministry and essentially a ministry that moved beyond the family. But neither one of those things happened.”

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