Oral Roberts

Granville Oral Roberts (born January 24, 1918) is an American neo-Pentecostal televangelist. He is also a leader in the charismatic movement and a former faith healer.

Early life

Roberts was born in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, as Granville Oral Roberts, the fifth and youngest child of the Rev. Ellis Melvin Roberts and Claudia Priscilla Irwin.^[1] His mother was one-quarter Cherokee.^{[citation needed]}

He left high school and his further education consists of about two years of college study at Oklahoma Baptist University and Phillips University. In 1938, he married a preacher's daughter, Evelyn Lutman Fahnestock.^[2] Their marriage lasted 66 years until her death on May 4, 2005. During their life together, they expanded his ministry from preaching in tents to preaching on the radio. Roberts became one of the forerunners on television and attracted a vast viewership. Furthermore, he has written several books, such as Miracle of Seed-Faith and three autobiographies:, Expect a Miracle, Oral Roberts: Life Story, and The Call.

Roberts originally made a name for himself with a mobile big tent "that sat 3,000 on metal folding chairs and he shouted at petitioners who did not respond to his healing."^[3] Roberts became a traveling faith healer after dropping out of college.^[3]

Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association

In 1947, Roberts resigned his pastoral ministry with the Pentecostal Holiness Church to found Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association. He began conducting evangelistic and faith healing crusades, mainly in the U.S. and appeared as a guest speaker for hundreds of national and international meetings and conventions. In the healing line, thousands of sick people would wait to stand before Oral Roberts so he could pray for them and lay his right hand on their afflicted body. According to his autobiography, there are many people healed in this manner.^{[citation needed]}

The Praying Hands, on the ORU campus in Tulsa, OK.

He founded Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1963, stating he was obeying a command from God. The university was chartered in 1963 and received its first students in 1965. Students were required to sign an honor code pledging not to drink, smoke, dance, party, or engage in premarital sex. Another part of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association is the Abundant Life Prayer Group, which operates day and night.^{[citation needed]}

In 1977 Roberts claimed to have 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.^[4][5]

In 1980, Roberts said he had a vision which encouraged him to continue the construction of his City of Faith Medical and Research Center, which opened in 1981. At the time, it was among the largest health facilities of its kind in the world and sought to merge prayer and medicine in the healing process. The City of Faith was in operation 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.^[6][7]

In 1987, during a fund raising drive, Roberts announced to a television audience that unless he raised $8 million by that March, God would "call him home" (a euphemism for death).^[8][9] Some were fearful that he was referring to suicide given the passionate pleas and tear that accompanied his statement. He raised $9.1 million.^[10] Later that year, he announced that God had raised the dead through Roberts' ministry.^[11]

the City of Faith Medical and Research Center complex in Tulsa, OK.

He stirred controversy, when as TIME carried in 1987, that he and his son, Richard Roberts as witness, claimed that he had seen his father raise a child from the dead.^[12] That year, the Bloom County comic strip recast its character, Bill the Cat as a satirized televangelist, "Fundamentally Oral Bill". Also in 1987 he started to "re-emphasizing faith healing and is reaching for his old-time constituency."^[12] However, his income continued to slide (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 ($10.7 million in 1986 alone).^[12]

In a 2004, television broadcast of Kenneth Copeland's Believer's Voice of Victory, the elder Roberts claimed to have experienced a vision in which "Smoke, and vapor, and blood" appeared "in the clouds in the skies above New York City and the east part of the United States, and which hung there for quite some time and then spread out across America, without touching the ground, and then God diffused it away from America and sent it out to the nations of the earth..." This was purportedly a "wake up call" to tell people that Christ's return is soon and to prepare for it. A transcript of this meeting is available online.^[13]

Currently Roberts, 89, is "semi retired" living in Newport Beach, California,^[14] and according to Charity Navigator Roberts earns $83,505 a year.^[15] The Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association has an overall efficiency rating of 1 out of 4 stars.^[16]

After his son, Richard Roberts, took a leave of absence from his position as President of Oral Roberts University on October 17, 2007, Oral announced he would return to help fulfill this administrative roll along with Billy Joe Daugherty, who was named as the executive regent to assume administrative responsibilities of the Office of the President by the ORU Board of Regents.

Family and personal life

Roberts' eldest son, Ronald, committed suicide in June 1982 at the age of 37 after getting a court order to get counseling at a drug treatment center in February.^[17] Another daughter, Rebecca Nash, died in a plane crash on February 11, 1977, with her husband, businessman Marshall Nash.^[18] Two of Oral Roberts' children are still living: son Richard, a well-known evangelist in his own right, and daughter Roberta Potts, a lawyer.

From the late 1980's to 1992 Roberts maintained a residence in the exclusive St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida.^{[citation needed]} Roberts would commute via private jet from his base in Oklahoma to Boca Raton airport for weekend visits to his golf club retreat. Most of the other residents of St. Andrews were Jewish, and since Roberts was identified by his first name of Granville when he was visiting Florida his presence went mostly unrecognized.

On May 4, 2005 Evelyn, Roberts' wife of 66 years, died.^[19]

According to a 1987 article in the New York Review of Books by Martin Gardner the "most accurate and best documented [biography] is Oral Roberts: An American Life (Indiana University Press, 1985), an objective impressive study by David Harrell Jr., a historian at the University of Alabama. The strongest critical attacks are in two out-of-print books: James Morris' The Preachers (St Martin's, 1973) and Jerry Sholes's Give me that Prime-Time Religion (Hawthorn, 1979)."^[20]

See also

• Christian evangelist scandals

Popular culture

• The musician MC 900 Ft. Jesus chose his name as a reference to Roberts' vision.

Footnotes

Books

About

• The Faith Healers, by James Randi, Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1987. ISBN 0879753692
• Oral Roberts: An American Life, by David Edwin Harrell, Jr., Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press ISBN 0-253-15844-3

By Roberts

• The Call: An autobiography. by Oral Roberts, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1972.
• Expect a miracle: my life and ministry. by Oral Roberts, Nashville : T. Nelson, 1995.ISBN 0785277528
• Oral Roberts' life story, as told by himself. by Oral Roberts, Tulsa, Okla. 1952.

External links

• Oral Roberts Ministries
• Oral Roberts University
• Oral Roberts Bio from ORM

Donate to Wikimedia