ROBERTS, Oral

(b. 24 January 1918 near Ada, Oklahoma), evangelist, faith healer, author, educator, and university founder and president.

Roberts, born Granville Oral Roberts, was the fifth and youngest child of Reverend Ellis M. Roberts, an independent Pentecostal evangelist, and Claudius Irwin Roberts, a homemaker. He claims Native American ancestry. Roberts grew up in poverty and struggled with stuttering. In 1933 he left home to attend school in another town but returned two years later when he was stricken with tuberculosis. He attended a revival meeting and says that he was healed when traveling evangelist George Moncey prayed for him. Roberts delivered his first sermon that evening.

Roberts married Evelyn Lutman on 25 December 1938, and the couple had four children. That same year he finished his first book, Salvation by the Blood. Roberts holds honorary law and doctor of divinity degrees from Centenary College of Louisiana and an honorary doctor of divinity from the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a master's of divinity from Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma, and a B.A. from Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee.

In the late 1940s Roberts affiliated with the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America (now the Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America). In 1948 he preached the final rally of that fellowship in Des Moines, Iowa. Then, in 1949 in Enid, Oklahoma, Roberts, in his fourth Pentecostal Church as pastor, heard God tell him that he had the ability to heal the afflicted. The following month he healed a woman who had been crippled for thirty-eight years. Roberts then resigned as pastor of the Pentecostal Church in Enid and began radio broadcasts from his large tent meetings. By 1950 he was traveling with an 18,000-seat tent and broadcasting his message on sixty-three radio stations. The Baptist evangelist Billy Graham invited Roberts to lead the prayer at the World Conference on Evangelism in Portland, Oregon, in 1950, and the audience gave Roberts a standing ovation. Two years later Roberts was broadcasting from over four hundred television and radio stations. In 1957 he claimed to be reaching an audience of a billion people. By comparison, radio evangelist Carl McIntire's 20th Century Reformation Hour was carried every day for a half hour in the 1960s on more than six hundred stations in the United States and Canada. Roberts has conducted more than three hundred evangelistic and healing crusades on six continents. He has also written more than 120 books.

The Pentecostal Holiness Church remained divided in their support of Roberts after 1953. Pentecostal leaders such as R. O. Corvin and Oscar Moore worked with Roberts in his evangelistic association. Although the white members of the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America had separated themselves from the African-American members in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1948, Roberts, like Billy Graham, welcomed African Americans to his services and did not segregate them from his white audience. At first Bishop Joseph A. Synan of the Pentecostal Holiness Church opposed Roberts, but he did attend the dedication ceremonies of Oral Roberts University in 1967.

Roberts broadcast his ministry on local television in the 1960s from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he also established his evangelical organization. Founded by its namesake, Oral Roberts University was first chartered in 1963, and its first students came in 1965. Seven years later, the school's enrollment had grown from 300 to 1,800 students, and it had a $48 million endowment. In 1963 Roberts was named "Indian of the Year" by the American Indian Exposition of Anadarko, Oklahoma. Roberts led a successful revival in Berlin, Germany (26 October to 4 November 1966). He left the Pentecostal Holiness Church in 1968 and joined the United Methodist Church, which then became the First United Methodist Church. Soon thereafter he supported the founding of the Business Men's Fellowship International, and he had access to their membership lists.

Roberts devised his evangelism around the theme of seed-faith. According to Roberts, those listeners and viewers who contributed to his ministry planted a seed that would grow and produce an abundance of spiritual and material dividends within this lifetime. According to his Miracle of Seed-Faith (1970), seed-faith's three attributes include making a blessing-pact covenant with God, sowing and reaping, and insisting on giving seed money to God so he can make it multiply and serve one's personal financial needs. Beginning in the 1960s Roberts used his huge computers at the Abundant Life Building in Tulsa to facilitate his mass mailings to supporters. In 1969 he produced a record with Senator Mark O. Hatfield with Hatfield reading "The Incomparable Christ" on one side and Roberts reading "Christ in Every Book in the Bible" on the other (Lexicon Music).

Roberts's family has been touched by tragedy. His daughter Rebecca and her husband were killed in an airplane crash in 1977, and his son Richard divorced his wife in 1979. In 1982 Roberts's son Ronald committed suicide.

After a vision from God, Roberts built the City of Faith Hospital in Tulsa. Roberts later had a vision of a 900-foot Jesus who picked up the City of Faith in his hands to encourage Roberts to complete the project; at the millennium, Roberts was continuing work on the institution. In 1987 God appeared to Roberts in another vision and told him to raise $8 million for Oral Roberts University scholarships within the next year or he would die. Roberts raised the money.

In the 1960s Roberts led the country in the founding of successful radio and television evangelism, and from that he built a state-of-the-art hospital and a major university. He is now retired, but his son Richard continues in his father's roles. Oral Roberts Ministry's magazine, Abundant Life, continues to publish articles telling readers that Roberts knows how God creates miracles. In addition to The Hour of Healing television show, Richard's wife, Lindsay, hosts the television program Make Your Day Count.

Roberts's memoir is The Call: An Autobiography (1972). Also see David Edwin Harrell, Oral Roberts: An American Life (1985) (reviewed in The New Republic, 29 Sept. 1986); James Morris, The Preachers (1973); and Charles H. Lippy, Twentieth-Century Shapers of American Popular Religion (1989).

Larry D. Griffin