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Guy Spiro: How did you become involved in your ministry and what was the evolution of your work?

Rev. Chris Chenoweth: I’m the former senior minister of the World Headquarters of Unity. I was a senior minister there for eleven years, from 1987 until 1998. When I left that position at Unity Village, I started to go around the country speaking at a different church every week. I continue that to this day.

     I prayed about a way that I could, with the thirty years or so I have left in ministry, make a maximum effect with my life. The idea kept coming to me in prayer to do a computer ministry. This was the strangest answer to prayer, because I didn’t even own a computer. All the time that I was at Unity Village they tried to get me a computer for my office and I didn’t want one. I didn’t know how to turn one on. I didn’t even like computers. But the idea kept coming and finally I said yes to it. The site really didn’t do much in the beginning and I did a lot more prayer on that. It’s a long story, but I did do prayer around that and somehow we were featured by Yahoo and listed in the Internet Life Magazine that Yahoo puts out. We were cited as being an internet phenomenon. How this happened we don’t know other than it was a full-blown miracle. Our volume was not that high. But of course you know what happens when something like that occurs. We went into the stratosphere almost overnight and we’ve stayed there since. We do a daily inspiration that now goes to three-fourths of a million homes every day around the world.

GS: 750,000 subscribers.

RCC: It’s free of charge. Those people are of every kind of religion. We don’t know exact numbers because we don’t ask who is a member of what church. We seek to support all people. We do know that many of our subscribers are Catholic. We estimate from the prayer requests that come in, that about 300,000 of our subscribers are Catholic. The second largest block is Southern Baptist and then we have, of course, Unity and other New Thought churches, but that’s a much smaller group as individual organizations.

GS: As I look at your site, other than the fact that you tend to speak at Unity churches, there is little to identify you as being a Unity minister.

RCC: It’s not a Unity work now. It’s non-denominational. I got the idea from Charles Fillmore—it was genius to make the Daily Word a non-denominational publication. That’s why it grew so large.

GS: Even today, the Daily Word goes out to a lot of people who are not Unity.

RCC: Yes, the vast majority are not Unity.

GS: How did you come to be a Unity minister in the first place? Had you an interest in metaphysics previously?

RCC: I was in broadcasting in Nashville and was approached by Gideon’s International to speak in churches on Sundays and on various other nights of the week, on behalf of the Memorial Bible Fund. What I didn’t realize at the time—it takes years sometimes to have a full realization of these things—is that I had been praying for a church that makes sense, one that I could believe in fully and not feel bad after I left the service. I realized later on that I not only did a search of churches, but was paid to do so. One of the last churches that I went into was a Unity church and, that day, I told the minister that I wanted to become a Unity minister. Now when that happens to me, I take it seriously. I just knew. I knew that this was my home and where I wanted to be.

GS: What metaphysical paths had you explored up until that time?

RCC: Individual reading and going to seminars. I attended the Divine Science Church a few times. That would be about the extent of it.

GS: What is cutting-edge for you now? What’s important?

RCC: I’ve really gone back to basics. I test any church out there, no matter what they call themselves outside, by the basic law of how loving are they.

GS: Expand on that.

RCC: You can go into any church and, if God is love, then that is a universally accepted belief among our people. Then if you go to a church, you can tell how really religious it is by how loving they are.

GS: So you’re not issuing any fatwas on presidents of foreign countries?

[laughter]

RCC: No.

GS: How do you see the love in an individual church? What are the evidences?

RCC: You have to spend some time “church shopping” to see fully what I mean. But you can also do it on Sunday morning by watching television. If you’re watching a show and they say that a certain person should be taken out, like Pat Robertson did, you know something is wrong. It doesn’t add up and it’s sure not the standard of Christianity.

     But you see that kind of thing. I speak at a lot of churches and, of course, going back years ago to when I was with the Gideons, I saw some horrible things. One of the worst things I ever saw was an eight year old girl who was called to the front of this huge mega-church in Tennessee. She thought that she was receiving some award. She came up there so very proud. The minister then came out and said that it had been reported that she had been seen at a public swimming pool, and does she realize that that is a sin?

     I actually saw, in front of my eyes, a soul partially die in a child because of receiving this kind of treatment before 3,000 people. Everyone just sat there. No one stood up and said that this was wrong and that they wouldn’t choose to be a part of this kind of consciousness anymore.

GS: I was raised in a fundamentalist church. I remember sitting there as a young boy thinking, now wait a minute, everybody in this room is going to heaven and everybody else in the world is going to hell? Come on, that can’t be true. Even at a young age, it just didn’t ring true for me. I had a lot of respect for Jesus’ teachings, but for myself, I had pretty much written off Christianity as a viable system until I ran into the New Thought churches

     I know what it was like to be a in a church somewhat like you were describing. The church that I grew up in had no mixed swimming or dancing. I sometimes jokingly call them, “no fun-damentalists.” They don’t want you to have any fun at all.

[laughter]

GS: But I’ve noticed in recent years, even in that church, there has been a softening somewhat. They don’t seem to be as adamant ...

RCC: This has been the power of the New Thought Movement.

GS: That’s where I was going.

RCC: When Charles and Myrtle Fillmore started Unity over 100 years ago, it was an extremely harsh religious environment across the board, no matter what the sign was out in front. One of the major influences that isn’t really known today is Unity’s positive influence on Christian music. In the early 1920s, Charles Fillmore opened a separate school for music and had a year-round curriculum to teach new, positive Christian music to people of all religions. That closed during the Depression, but it was a separate building and they were way ahead of time with their wax cylinders that they put out and their records. I’ve heard a lot over the years about what an influence that had on the leaders of the various religions of the time. Robert Schuller once told me that was the major influence Unity had on him. When Norman Vincent Peale first brought up the power of positive thinking in 1955, he was practically kicked out of his church because it was such a radically different idea. Now it’s pretty much accepted.

GS: I had a stepmother who’d look you right in the eye and tell you that she belonged to the one true church, founded by Jesus, and that it had existed unbroken ever since he founded it. I told her that I looked it up and that they split from the Assembly of God about 1900 over pianos in church. She was not impressed. It didn’t change her mind at all.

RCC: My first church was in Rockford, Illinois. I served there for five years, so I was in Chicago a lot. The worst argument I ever had was with some Moody Bible Institute students in downtown Chicago. They saw a bumper sticker on my car. I don’t even remember what it said now, but it attracted them and pretty soon I had ten of them around my car. They started to quote the Bible to me and then I started to tell them what it really meant. But you can argue a point with someone and it doesn’t matter if you have the facts and can even prove it. If they believe something, that’s what they believe. Don’t confuse it with the facts.

GS: I’ve been quoted from the pulpit at Moody. One of the ministers there held up my magazine in his hand and denounced it one Sunday.

RCC: Yes. I believe that.

GS: I went to our particular Unity church for several years before I really discovered the early Unity writings. I’ve been impressed just recently with the resurgence of interest in the real root teachings. I’m very happy to see that come more to the forefront now.

RCC: Yes. I am, too. That is the core and it’s really what it was founded upon.

GS: The core teachings are excellent. I go back and read Christian Healing and Charles’ other writings and I’m very impressed. One of the things that I’m struck by is that Unity and the other new thought churches’ approach to Christianity shows that Jesus’ teachings are actually more appropriate to the Age of Aquarius than they were the Age of Pisces. I mean, it’s every bit as current today as it ever was.

RCC: Very much so.

GS: So, what are your favorite areas of the teachings? What are you most excited about?

RCC: Now I’m more of a writer than I am a minister. I often tell people that the “Rev” in front of my name, really stands more for “revise” than it does “reverend.” It changes so much. Now it’s just keeping up with the work load. We get about 1,500 new prayer requests every day. The nice thing about it being done over the internet is that I don’t need to have people all here in one location. I have people who help me to answer the prayer requests all over the United States. So we split up the work load. I do see all the requests that come in.

GS: That’s an awful lot of reading to do on a daily basis.

RCC: It’s a long day. I work a lot harder than I ever did at Unity Village. It starts at about 7:00 a.m. and goes to about 9:00 p.m. every night that I’m here in the office. When I’m on the road, I take my laptop with me and run it from wherever I am with a high-speed connection. I’m still going around the country almost every week. I’m going to Roanoke, Virginia, this Saturday, and later on this month, I’ll be in Bloomington, Illinois. After that, I’m in California for an appearance, and then I’ll be in Evanston on October 16th. Then I’ve got a week-long thing in Austin, Texas. It’s a pretty busy life. We just came back this past Monday from taking two hundred people on a spiritual retreat cruise to Alaska. People ask me about my success and I say that it’s kind of like being duct-taped to the space shuttle. It’s going so fast, but it’s a wonderful view.

GS: All you can do is hang on, huh?

RCC: Yeah, really.

GS: What will you be doing when you’re here?

RCC: I’m going to be doing a seminar called “Spiritual Steps for Great Relationships.” There are relationship seminars out there, but what I noticed was that most of them are at extremely high fees: a couple would have to pay between $1,500 and $2,000 to attend. What I did was put together over several years ten major points that couples can use immediately to improve their relationships. It’s for single people, too, who want to do it right this time, to be properly equipped so they don’t even go into a dating relationship making mistake after mistake. It’s a three-hour seminar where people can immediately take something away with them, and use it over the next month, that can turn around relationships. And we have, too. We have had couples attend this seminar who have been on the verge of divorce, and who have decided to do this as a trial, to see if it can make any improvement, and it has made a vast improvement in their relationship.

GS: Without going into too much detail, can you tell us what are these ten points?

RCC: All the points are about communication. Good marriages, and this will surprise you and is something that I say during the seminar, good marriages actually have thirty minutes of actual communication a week. Most communication between a couple is about something else. Like you’re watching CNN and commenting about what’s happening in New Orleans, or reading the paper, or talking about the kids, or the family dog. You’re not communicating soul to soul or eyeball to eyeball. A relationship is a relating-ship. It’s how you relate to the other person. So the whole seminar, the ten points, is based on improving communication skills between the two of you, and having magic quality time that will cause a couple to come together instead of split apart. Most couples today are living in the same house, but they’re strangers. They don’t really know the other person. By taking a seminar like this, you can get to know the other person again, and immediately stop repeating the mistakes that pushed the other person’s buttons and caused each of you to divide apart and put up shields of protection between you.

GS: So, the ten points are all related to greater and more honest and open communication ...

RCC: For instance, one of the points is a formal “statute of limitations.” This is a common sense thing. But most couples, when they fight, bring up things that happened years ago and, all of a sudden, a normal argument can go nuclear and there will be a huge blowup. Having a statute of limitations is very common sense and very simple. That’s the type of things that we share.

     I invite everybody to come. There is no fee; a love offering will be taken. But it’s a real, real chance to start to do relationships right.

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