Mega-Church emphasizes love of Scripture, Israel

By Donald H. Harrison

EL CAJON, California—The senior pastor whose  mega-church includes architectural homages to the Holy Land recently was joined in marriage by a Christian Zionist leader from the San Francisco area with ties to the family of Holocaust rescuer Oskar Schindler.  Now, the Rev. Jim Garlow and his bride, Rosemary Schindler Garlow, are planning a night sometime later this year to honor Israel in their church’s 2,000-seat auditorium as well as a congregational trip to Israel.

The Garlows recently pointed out some of their church’s architectural features during a wide-ranging interview in which they also discussed their love for Israel and Rosemary’s connection by a former marriage to the German industrialist made famous by the Steven Spielberg movie, Schindler’s List.

A “heritage walk” starts in the Skyline Church courtyard and winds its way around the complex.  Listed on paving stones are the names of 350 biblical personages, starting with Adam and Eve, who appear in Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.

To appreciate the analogies drawn by this church sitting atop a hill overlooking the Rancho San Diego neighborhood of El Cajon, to the east of the City of San Diego,  it would be helpful to carry a pocket Tanakh so one could quickly thumb through the quotations.  For example, near the entrance, there is an array of three large rocks with carved allusions to 1 Samuel 7:12;  Isaiah 2:2, and Ezekiel 11:23.

Here, from the Art Scroll Tanakh are those quotations in order: “Samuel then took one rock and placed it between Mizpah and the cliff and called it Eben-ezer (the Rock of Help), saying, “Hashem helped us until here.” …. “It will happen at the end of days: The mountain of the Temple of Hashem will be firmly established as the head of the mountains, and it will be exalted above the hills, and all the nations will stream to it.” … “And the glory of Hashem ascended from over the midst of the city and stood upon the mountain that is east of the city.”

So, we get the idea that this church, inspired by the teachings of 18^th century Protestant leaders John and Charles Wesley,  is intended to emulate the Temple of Solomon.  Any doubts to this effect might be erased when one enters the atrium leading to the church’s large sanctuary/ auditorium.  Two pillars, each measuring 27 feet tall, are named Boaz and Jachim like those of Solomon’s Temple.  Rev. Garlow said when the pillars were built, he did not realize that 27 feet corresponded to the height of 18 cubits, which is the measurement given in the description of Solomon’s Temple in Jeremiah 52:21.

“The pillars went up and stood by themselves for some time, and at that point we discovered that the height was the same,” said Garlow.

On the left side of the atrium, 12 stones are encased, a physical reminder of the passage told in Joshua 4:8 in which Moses’s successor commemorated the splitting of the Jordan River that allowed the children of Israel to proceed to the Promised Land without getting wet:  “They carried twelve stones from the Jordan, as Hashem had told Joshua, [corresponding] to the number of tribes of the Children of Israel, and brought them across with them to the lodging place and set them there.”  The stones in the church are from London, “which come from our own heritage … from the 1778 foundation of the John Wesley chapel on City Road,” Garlow explained.

The far wall of the atrium was fashioned from stone reminiscent of the Western Wall in Jerusalem.  The church uses it like a prayer wall.  “It is intentionally designed for people to gather and pray and there is a container that has paper and pencils.  On Sundays, people going in and out of the auditorium will stand here and they will write out their prayer requests and they will put them in this wall just like the Western Wall, and that is what we call our ‘healing wall.’”

While Garlow’s wife of 42 years, Carol, was unsuccessfully  battling cancer, she was extended the honor by the church’s board of directors of laying the first stone.

Garlow is the third senior pastor of the church in its 60-year history, and the first to serve at the mega-church’s 135-acre location on the El Cajon hilltop.  His predecessors, Rev. Orval Butcher and Rev. John Maxwell, led the church at its former home in Lemon Grove.

The widowed pastor met Rosemary Schindler as a result of being asked to speak at a Christian conference, at which she was listed as one of the participants. He was still grieving so he didn’t go, but he watched  videos about the Christian Zionist tours Rosemary regularly leads to Israel.  They struck a chord in his heart, and he made inquiries about her, began an email correspondence, and eventually flew to the San Francisco area to meet her.  The couple was married in January of this year.

Rosemary’s first husband, Walter Schindler, from whom she was divorced, was part of the same family from western Czechoslovakia  (known to Germans as Sudetenland) to which Oskar Schindler belonged.  Walter’s grandfather, a minor Nazi official, was Oskar Schindler’s second cousin.  Unlike Oskar, Walter’s grandfather did not have a change of heart, going along with Adolf Hitler until the end.

Rosemary recalled during an interview that a series of events were formative in her spiritual life.  Born Rosemary Sumner, she had been active for many years in the Shiloh Church in the San Francisco Bay area, where her parents are pastors.  When the Spielberg movie Schindler’s List came out in 1991, she was prompted to research the family connection.  She was able to obtain copies of Walter’s grandfather’s  “Aryan genealogical passport that Hitler required Nazi officials to produce as evidence that their lineage back to the mid-1700s was what they called ‘racially pure,’ meaning ‘no Jewish blood.’  So they had to go to churches and search the baptismal records to certify each generation.”  The Nazi genealogies were “put into booklets that were taken and stamped by the Nazi government as evidence of their authenticity.”  Finding a family booklet, the California Schindlers verified their relation to Oskar.

Even though many members of the family were Nazis, “not one member of the Schindler family died in World War II,” Rosemary said.  “Everybody came back home and we feel that is because of the righteousness of one man, Oskar, that the Genesis 12:3 blessing came upon all the Schindlers—even to the fact that at the end of the war an American sergeant from Dallas came over and took over the block house (where Walter’s grandfather had lived) and befriended the Schindler family and sponsored them to come to the United States.  So the kindness was extended to the enemy even to bring them life and blessing, and the act that Oskar did to help save his employees resulted in multiple blessings on all his family.”

Genesis 12:3 is an important biblical passage that is especially familiar to members of Christians United for Israel (CUFIJ), an organization started in 2004 which Rosemary estimates at 1.5 million strong today throughout the United States.  In the Torah portion Lech Lecha, when God sends Abram to leave his father’s home to seek a new land, He tells Abram (later to be called Abraham): “I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.”

In 1996,  Rosemary made her first trip to Israel.  “I was teaching in Bible college and I was given a trip as an educator to the place of my subject matter, and so I went to Israel.  The first morning, I was in Jerusalem.  I looked upon the city and I felt these words in my heart, of God saying to me ‘This is My first love.  This is the land and the people I care about and if you are teaching My word and My subject then you need to also have My heart for this very area.’

As she toured through Israel and learned about its Christian history, she was shocked.  She learned that rather than being the heroes she had believed the Crusaders to be, they pillaged and murdered.  “They rounded up the Jews and put them into a synagogue and set them afire, while singing ‘Christ, We Adore Thee’ and I was so sad, so ashamed as a Christian…. It began to give me an awareness that Christians were the worst perpetrators of persecution against them (the Jews) and now perhaps, in our time, we can begin to turn that around, not that we can ever make up for what was done, but indeed bring some acknowledgment of repentance, asking forgiveness, and then showing restitution by aiding Israel in their redemption, helping her rebuild, helping to give and to bless and to be watchmen for Israel as the Bible commands us to be.”

Rosemary Schindler Garlow acknowledged in our interview that many in the Jewish community are suspicious that Christian Evangelicals may have a conversionary agenda underlying their support for Israel.  “My job is to convert the Christians, not the Jews,” she asserts.  Christian theologians who say that Christianity replaced Judaism are “totally wrong,” she said.  Such a concept is “evil and has led even to the Holocaust; Hitler used the quotes of church leaders to this very end.”

She added: “We are not to convert.  I do not believe in proselytization and always when I would have a gathering I would state at the beginning, ‘this meeting is non-conversionary.  This meeting is not about converting anyone but coming and supporting Jewish people.’   I am a Christian. I don’t deny my testimony in the fact that it was through Jesus that I came to have my faith, but Christians United for Israel is non-conversionary.  Also; it is a solidarity organization in support of Israel.  Because our (Christian) words brought such evil we really have no right to say anything. If we want to share our faith, we need to do it through action and that is by doing good deeds and supporting Jewish causes and letting actions speak louder than words.”

Rev. Garlow said as a boy growing up on a farm in Kansas, he grew up in a family that “had a passion for Israel and I assumed every other family did.  One of my relatives was the first to go to Israel of anybody I knew, before tourism trips were being done.  In our one-room country school, at a PTA meeting, the subject was his slides of Israel, and it was stamped on my mind.  I was just a third or fourth grader, but all the preaching I heard was so strong on Israel’s history and then in June 1967, which was wheat harvest time in Kansas, we were working on the combine and we were listening on the radio to the events of the (Six-Day) war, and I assumed every family was like this.  We tracked the victories, and they seemed like great personal victories.”

He made his first trip to Israel with his first wife and his parents, and “my father—a guy who loved the soil, loved Kansas, and thanked God he was born in Kansas, when he got to Israel, he said these words to me: ‘Now I have been home,’ and I doubt the average Jewish person understands the depth that evangelical Christians feel in that connectivity.  Even if we don’t understand a single word that is being said, when we hear that language (Hebrew), it is sweet to the ears.”

Rosemary Garlow said that after the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, she came to fear that a Holocaust could be coming to America.  “Terrorism is now at the door; you cannot be silent,” she said.

Ever since, hoping to bring the blessings of Genesis 12:3 on the United States, she has been traveling to Israel “three times a year at least, bringing as many Christians to Israel as I can to connect them in ways that would help them support and to get to know the people, and gain an understanding for themselves against the propaganda that we are hearing in the media all the time.”

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com