3,000 Churchgoers Participate : Crystal Cathedral Joins ‘Hands’

If Hands Across America creator Ken Kragen had wandered into the Crystal Cathedral Sunday morning, he might have felt a twinge or two of envy. The Rev. Robert H. Schuller delivered a more smoothly run event than the master promoter himself.

More than 3,000 parishioners in their Sunday best, packing copies of “The Possibility Thinkers Bible” by Schuller and a wide assortment of the latest in camera technology, crammed into the brilliantly illuminated glass church to get religion and hold hands for the hungry.

It was enough people, had they been elsewhere, to fill a gap or two in the sparsely populated desert stretches of the coast-to-coast human chain.

The church was one of many stops on the 4,125-mile line of hand-holders.

The idea of passing through the cathedral came about several months ago when Kragen, a friend of Schuller’s, was a guest on the television preacher’s show “Hour of Power,” church spokesman Mick Nason said last week. “He and Bob (Schuller) got to talking, and between them they said, ‘Why not have it go through the cathedral?’ ”

Schuller made the most of the opportunity.

The cathedral’s closed-circuit video cameras continuously panned the church crowd, flashing images of the minister, hand-holders and marching band members performing patriotic tunes on the screen above the pulpit.

In his Memorial Day sermon, Schuller invoked President Reagan, the Statue of Liberty and the American hostages in Beirut. He called Kragen “a real Possibility Thinker . . . one of the ones who are really free.”

“During this service we’re going to have the Hands Across America participation,” Schuller told the enthusiastic congregation. “I think it (the cathedral) is the only church in America where the line is going to go straight through the church. . . . Now let’s join Americans from coast to coast and join hands.”

With his entire 11:15 a.m. service planned around the spectacle, Schuller segued into the ceremony with a short prayer--”We want to be strong enough to help the weak, rich enough to give to the poor”--and a video of the Crystal Cathedral kids telling what liberty means to them.

With prayers and video out of the way, tan-jacketed ushers raced up and down plush aisles, linking the line, filling in gaps and shouting, “Let’s go; let’s go. Get ‘em up.”

The human chain snaked up staircases, into balconies, through pews and out the doors of the huge glass church to join the line on Chapman Avenue.

The song “We Are the World” blasted through the brilliantly illuminated church, its words flashed on the video screen.

A newborn baby in its mother’s arms became one of the youngest links in the cross-country chain when an older woman reached out and grasped the infant’s flailing arm.

“Ooh, I have goose bumps,” whispered one woman.

As the video screen flashed Cable News Network footage of handholding in New York City and Los Angeles, one father stooped down to his young son and shouted over joyous singers: “You see, you see, it is all the way to New York.”