Oral Roberts (Wikipedia)

Granville Oral Roberts (January 24, 1918 – December 15, 2009) was an American Pentecostal televangelist and a Christian charismatic. He was the founder of Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association and Oral Roberts University.

During his ministry that exceeded six decades, reaching millions of people around the world, he became embroiled in controversies and criticism from both Christians and non-Christians alike. His healing ministry and bringing American Pentecostalism into the mainstream had the most impact, but he also pioneered TV evangelism and laid the foundations of the prosperity gospel and abundant life. In conservative Protestant culture, his ministry had a worldwide impact second only to Billy Graham….

Roberts became a traveling faith healer after ending his college studies without a degree. According to a TIME Magazine profile of 1972, Roberts originally made a name for himself with a large mobile tent “that sat 3,000 on metal folding chairs” where “he shouted at petitioners who did not respond to his healing.”…

He founded Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1963, stating he was obeying a command from God….

In 1977, Roberts claimed to have had a vision from a 900-foot-tall Jesus who told him to build City of Faith Medical and Research Center, and the hospital would be a success. In 1980, Roberts said he had a vision which encouraged him to continue the construction of his City of Faith Medical and Research Center in Oklahoma, which opened in 1981. At the time, it was among the largest health facilities of its kind in the world and was intended to merge prayer and medicine in the healing process. The City of Faith operated for only eight years before closing in late 1989. The Orthopedic Hospital of Oklahoma still operates on its premises. In 1983 Roberts said Jesus had appeared to him in person and commissioned him to find a cure for cancer.

Roberts’ fundraising was controversial. In January 1987, during a fundraising drive, Roberts announced to a television audience that unless he raised $8 million by that March, God would “call him home.” Some were fearful that he was referring to suicide, given the impassioned pleas and tears that accompanied his statement. He raised $9.1 million. Later that year, he announced that God had raised the dead through Roberts’ ministry….

He stirred up controversy when Time reported in 1987 that his son Richard Roberts claimed that he had seen his father raise a child from the dead….

In 1987 Time stated that he was “re-emphasizing faith healing and (is) reaching for his old-time constituency.” However, his income continued to decrease (from $88 million in 1980 to $55 million in 1986, according to the Tulsa Tribune) and his largely vacant City of Faith Medical Center continued to lose money.

Harry McNevin said that in 1988 the ORU Board of Regents “rubber-stamped” the “use of millions in endowment money to buy a Beverly Hills property so that Oral Roberts could have a West Coast office and house”. In addition, he said a country club membership was purchased for the Roberts’ home. The lavish expenses led to McNevin’s resignation from the Board. [For more eye-opening details, see the story that was published by the Washington Post on Nov 9, 2007.)

Richard Roberts resigned from the presidency of ORU on November 23, 2007 after being named as a defendant in a lawsuit alleging improper use of university funds for political and personal purposes, and improper use of university resources. The university was given a donation of $8 million by entrepreneur Mart Green, and although the lawsuit is still in process, the school has submitted to an outside audit, and with a good report will be given an additional $62 million by Green.... (For more details about this scandal, see the entry I posted on Nov 24, 2007.)

Oral Roberts (The Telegraph; Dec 16)

Oral Roberts, who died on Tuesday aged 91, was the doyen of American televangelists, a breed that has played a vital part in guiding a third of adult Americans to a life as born-again Christians.

From the time he began his ministry in the 1940s Roberts was one of the most successful practitioners of the art of blending a hellfire vision with the growing material success of his traditionally poor and unsophisticated followers. His creed dictated that people are saved not so much by grace but by the uses to which they put their money....

Roberts placed his miraculous powers of faith healing at the centre of his ministry. In his early days, when he addressed gatherings of the faithful in tents, he would lay his (divinely anointed) right hand on the afflicted and claimed to achieve instant cures. Petitioners who failed to respond to his ministrations were bawled out.

As he moved on to the airwaves, Roberts routinely attempted to heal his followers of a wide range of diseases – from cancer to haemorrhoids – by placing his healing hand against the lens of the camera and asking the afflicted to touch their television screens. The miracle cures thus effected were often accompanied by requests for "seed faith" donations – "twenty dollars, Visa, Amex, whatever the Lord leads you to do".

By the early 1980s the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association employed 2,300 people and was grossing $110 million a year in donations. At its base in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Roberts built a sort of divine Disneyworld, graced by the world's largest bronze sculpture, a 60ft pair of hands clasped in prayer, a 200ft glass and steel "prayer tower" topped by an eternal gas flame, and a 777ft artificial stream called the River of Life.

There was also an Oral Roberts University, opened in 1965, where students were exhorted to dress and behave in an attractive way. Women were encouraged to wear make-up and fashionable clothes. The chronically fat risked expulsion....

In the late 1970s, inspired by a "conversation" with God, Roberts embarked on his most ambitious project – a City of Faith medical and research complex consisting of a 60-storey clinic and a hospital with 777 beds (according to Roberts, 777 was a mystical number). Although the Tulsa authorities told him there was no need for the hospital, Roberts went ahead anyway, drawing comfort from a vision of a 900ft-tall figure of Christ which picked up the enormous building in his hands and said: "Look how easy it is."

But the secular authorities turned out to be right. By the mid-1980s only a few score of the beds had been filled and the hospital was running a million-dollar-a-month deficit. In a dramatic announcement in July 1984, Roberts reported that Jesus had once again visited him, and an "angel of the Lord" had been placed at his disposal. The angel was dispatched to bring the "poor, needy and the sick" to the City of Faith, but it seemed that most preferred conventional medicine. By the end of 1986 the financial situation was desperate.

In January 1987 Roberts told his followers that he had been having an "ongoing conversation" with God, who had threatened to "call him home" unless they stumped up $8 million by March 31 for his medical missionary programme. His son Richard followed this up by sending a birthday card to supporters, asking them to return to it to his father with a cheque: "Let's not let this be my Dad's last birthday," he wrote. At the end of January his followers were relieved to hear that Roberts had been granted a reprieve, as God had extended the deadline to the end of the year....

[T]he tactic worked – in the short term. Roberts raised $9.1 million, including a donation of $1.3 million from a dog track owner, and eventually descended from his prayer tower, where he had been holding a fast. The following week the tower was struck by lightning. No one was hurt.

More ominously for Roberts, though, some television stations had refused to broadcast his appeal, objecting that it smacked of extortion. Fellow evangelists attacked his tactics as “bad for the gospel and bad for business”. By 1989 his financial difficulties had got the better of him and he was forced to close the medical centre. The affair rather knocked the stuffing out of Roberts’s ministry, though he remained chancellor of Oral Roberts University….

[I]n 1979 a book published by Jerry Sholes, a former employee, gave a vivid description of the Roberts lifestyle: “He dresses in Brioni suits that cost $500 to $1,000; walks in $100 shoes; lives in a $250,000 house in Tulsa and has a million-dollar home in Palm Springs; wears diamond rings and solid gold bracelets … drives $25,000 automobiles which are replaced every six months; flies around the country in a $2 million Fanjet Falcon … and plays games of financial hanky-panky that have made him and his family members independently wealthy (millionaires) for life.”

In 1987 Roberts was one of the few to come to the aid of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, who had become involved in a sordid sex and financial scandal. “I sat with Bakker and he told me ‘Yes, seven years ago, I sinned. I’m not guilty but I did wrong’,” Roberts told his followers. Roberts then said he asked Bakker: “What did you do?” – at which point a thunderstorm over Tulsa cut off the television signal.

Roberts’s last three decades were marked by tragedy. His daughter Rebecca and her husband were killed in an air crash in 1977. Five years later his rebellious elder son Ronnie committed suicide. A grandchild also died….

Remembering Oral Roberts’ Greatest Test (Peter Smith/The Lousiville Courier-Journal; Dec 18)

Many people this week have been remembering Oral Roberts as a forerunner of the so-called Prosperity Gospel, and they’re correct.

But as an alumnus of the university he founded and that bears his name, I remember him more than anything as a tragic figure whose own life put that doctrine to the most severe test, when all the prayer and medicine he could muster could not save a grandson that bore his name.

Roberts died this week at 91, a giant of American Christianity who, like Billy Graham, was a pioneer in bringing evangelism first to the big tent and then to the small screen and every other electronic medium available.

But unlike Graham, Roberts prayed for the sick by laying on of hands, and he claimed regularly to see the fulfillment of what became his famous motto, “Expect a Miracle.” His book, “The Miracle of Seed Faith,” claimed God wanted people to prosper materially and has influenced many “prosperity preachers” since then. It remains a controversial legacy.

I only met Oral Roberts to shake his hand once or twice during my four years at ORU, yet we students regularly heard Oral Roberts preach.

He often repeated the same message he had for decades — that when one gives even when needy, God blesses the giver with a literally multiplied return. He often expounded gospel stories about the disciples hauling in greater loads of fish than they could handle, or the parables about a sower reaping a hundred-fold return.

That parable inspired his teaching of “Seed Faith,” which many obituary writers this week have correctly cited as a forerunner of the “prosperity gospel” that prevails in many Pentecostal and charismatic circles worldwide. A big reason the teaching is controversial is that those teaching it ask to be on the receiving end of others’ faithful giving.

He seized on a seemingly routine greeting at the start of the small Bible epistle of 3 John — “that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth” — and built that into a core principle.

Oral Roberts presented himself as giving no quarter to doubts. He recalled with disdain those who prayed for him as a teenager to be cured from tuberculosis only if it was “God’s will.” He was inspired by a faith healer who boldly commanded the disease to depart from him. Soon he was a faith healer himself.

Yet Roberts and his loyal wife Evelyn, who died in 2005, experienced severe tragedy. They outlived two children — one dead in a plane crash, another in a suicide. Compared to that, the controversies that led to the resignation of son Richard as president of the university in 2007 may seem merely a disappointment.

Yet I have rarely seen someone so devastated as Oral Roberts after the death of his grandson, Richard Oral Roberts, in 1984. The infant son of Richard and Lindsay Roberts died shortly after childbirth.

I recall the chapel memorial service beginning with a forced, upbeat praise song, “We Bring the Sacrifice of Praise.” Many at the chapel found it hard to bring the words out of their throats. Lindsay Roberts sat convulsed in grief in her chair at one side of the stage. As I recall, Oral Roberts told us he was hurting more than he ever had before, and insisted that students repeat back pledges to support his ministry.

Here’s how biographer David Edwin Harrell Jr., author of “Oral Roberts: An American Life,” describes the tragedy:

“For over thirty hours, while doctors fought to save the baby, Oral, Richard, and others prayed. Lindsay was wheeled up to the baby’s side to pray; (fellow Tulsan faith healer) Kenneth Hagin and his wife, and other ministers, came to pray for healing. When Richard Oral finally died, on Jan. 19, it ‘devastated Oral,’ (Evelyn Roberts said). He called it the worst tragedy of his scarred life. ‘I think’ Evelyn reflected, ‘because he felt there was so much healing power in that room that they could have healed a thousand people….Some obstacle would not leave. It was stubborn.’”

The family, Harrell wrote, “once again faced misfortune bravely, searching for meaning in the death. They immediately announced the addition of an obstetrics suite in the City of Faith Medical Center in memory of Richard Oral Roberts.”

Yet the medical center itself, which Roberts emphatically stated God told him to build, was soon to close, as the obituaries this week point out….

To learn more about the so-called Prosperity Gospel that Roberts helped to inspire, see Theist Files #2926 and #4499.