Oral Roberts

Oral Roberts (born January 24, 1918, near Ada, Oklahoma, U.S.—died December 15, 2009, Newport Beach, California) was an American Pentecostal evangelist known for his televised faith-healing ministry. Roberts was one of the first proponents of the “prosperity gospel,” a theology teaching that God desires temporal happiness and security for his faithful and rewards devotion and generous tithing or donations with financial wealth and other blessings. A groundbreaking televangelist, Roberts mentored a number of younger ministers who went on to have television and multimedia empires of their own.

The fifth and youngest child of a desperately poor Pentecostal preacher and farmer, Roberts suffered a nearly fatal case of tuberculosis as a teenager and failed to finish high school. In 1935 he underwent a conversion experience in which he believed that he was miraculously healed. Three years later he married Evelyn Lutman Fahnestock, a preacher’s daughter. He spent 12 years as a pastor in several towns in the South and built up his own organization, the Pentecostal Holiness Church. He studied at Oklahoma Baptist College (1943–45) and other religious universities part-time.

Claiming to have received direct communications from God, Roberts began an itinerant ministry of faith healing in the late 1940s. The Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, became the parent organization for this and other endeavours, including a publishing firm, and Roberts became known for his luxurious way of life. He continued his faith-healing services both in the U.S. and abroad, often inside an enormous traveling tent where he would place his hands on his followers and pray for their healing. The rise of his ministry in the 1950s coincided with the burgeoning of the television industry, and Roberts, a natural showman, was among the first American religious leaders to use this novel communications tool. Indeed, he reached wide audiences through radio and television, drawing in followers with his deep knowledge of Scripture and approachable speaking style. By the 1970s his television program Oral Roberts and You was the leading televised religious broadcast in the U.S. It is estimated that he personally prayed over more than 1.5 million people during his career, and thousands of his followers claimed to have been healed through him, though leaders of other Christian communities questioned the authenticity of the miracles.

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In 1963 Roberts founded Oral Roberts University, an interdenominational Protestant institution, in Tulsa. It began admitting students in 1965. He served as its first president and continued his association with the university into the early 21st century, holding the office of chancellor.

In 1978 Roberts began building the City of Faith Medical and Research Center in Tulsa, despite opposition from the region’s established medical community, which regarded another such facility there as unnecessary. The centre struggled financially, and in January 1987 Roberts made a widely ridiculed televised appeal that tied his life to a $4.5 million fundraising goal: “I’m asking you to help extend my life. We’re at the point where God could call Oral Roberts home in March.” His broadcast raised a total of $8 million, and he announced that his life had been spared. The medical centre closed in 1989.

Roberts’s life was marked by a number of tragedies. He lost his eldest child, Rebecca, and her husband to a deadly plane crash in 1977. His son Ronnie died by suicide in 1982. His wife preceded him in death in 2005. Roberts died of complications from pneumonia at age 91. He wrote more than 50 books, including the autobiography Expect a Miracle (1995).