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Televangelist Oral Roberts dies; pioneering preacher of the 'prosperity gospel' was 91
One of the most famous preachers of the 20th century founded a university in Tulsa, Okla., that bears his name. He paired TV with sophisticated and relentless direct-mail campaigns.
By William Lobdell
2:12 PM PST, December 15, 2009
Oral Roberts, a dirt-poor, Oklahoma farm boy who popularized the idea of a "prosperity gospel" while becoming one of the world's most recognizable televangelists, died today. He was 91.
Roberts, founder of the 5,400-student university in Tulsa that is named after him, died of complications of pneumonia at a Newport Beach hospital, family spokeswoman Melany Ethridge said. The televangelist had suffered a fall this weekend.
With his popular broadcasts, Roberts became one of the most famous preachers of the 20th century by pioneering the use of television and computerized databases to spread the Gospel and raise hundreds of millions of dollars -- a formula followed today by numerous other ministries.
Using sophisticated and relentless direct-mail campaigns, Roberts popularized the use of the "prosperity gospel," which asserts that God generously rewards financial acts of faith done in His name.
"It gives people hope and expectation that seeds sown to God will be multiplied back in every area of life," Roberts wrote in his 1995 autobiography, "Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry."
Roberts brought Pentecostalism -- which promotes charismatic worship including faith healings and talking in tongues -- to the American mainstream, giving it a new-found sense of legitimacy among the middle class and within other denominations.
"More than any other person, he should be credited with starting the charismatic movement in mainline religion," said Vinson Synan, dean of the divinity school at Regent University in Virginia and historian of the Pentecostal movement. "He brought [divine] healing into the American consciousness."
Worldwide, the charismatic branch of Christianity -- now found in mainstream denominations as well as Pentecostalism -- grew from an estimated 20 million to 600 million during Roberts' decades in ministry. His international broadcasts and crusades deserve a large part of the credit for the increase, Christian scholars said.In the 1970s, Roberts' prime-time specials drew 40 million viewers, and he appeared frequently on talk shows, including with Johnny Carson, Dinah Shore and Merv Griffin. The preacher also had a half-hour program -- "Something Good Is Going to Happen to You" -- that aired Sundays.
By 1980, Roberts was recognized by 84% of Americans, close behind the U.S. president and fellow evangelist Billy Graham and 40 points ahead of the next religious figure.
"Not bad," he once said, "for a poor boy with a speech impediment who was supposed to die of tuberculosis before he was 20."
At the time of his death, however, Roberts' ministry and celebrity had been in decline for years, a drop-off accelerated by a prophecy the preacher made 22 years ago that "God will call me home" unless $8 million was raised for scholarships to Oral Roberts University by March 31, 1987.
The money was raised, but by then, Roberts had become a laughingstock to many inside and outside the Christian world.
With dwindling revenues -- they once stood at more than $100 million a year -- the televangelist was forced in 1989 to downsize his ministry, laying off 250 employees, closing Tulsa's City of Faith medical center and an adjoining medical school and selling vacation homes and luxury cars to raise money.
A heart attack in 1992 forced him into semi-retirement, though he remained the chancellor of Oral Roberts University. He spent most of his final years in a Newport Beach condominium with his wife, Evelyn, who died in April 2005. They had been married 66 years.
Granville Oral Roberts, the youngest of five children, was born in a log cabin near Ada, Okla., on Jan. 24, 1918, the son of a part-time preacher and farmer. His mother was part Cherokee.
At the time, Pentecostalism was spreading across the country from its beginnings at the 1906 Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles. Those attracted to the movement believed in the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in the New Testament's Book of Acts, including divine healing and speaking in tongues -- which Pentecostals believe is an alleged supernatural occurrence where worshipers talk in foreign and special angelic languages in a form of prayer.
Roberts was raised in a Pentecostal-flavored Methodist church, and the family later joined the Pentecostal Holiness church.
As a child, Roberts excelled in sports and accompanied his father to neighboring towns where he preached at Pentecostal revivals. Despite a stutter, young Roberts dreamed of becoming a lawyer or even governor of Oklahoma.
At 17, he contracted tuberculosis and spent five months bedridden before his family took him on a mattress to a healing service at a tent revival in town. It was there, Roberts reported in his autobiography, that he was healed of TB and his stutter and that he first heard God's plan for his life: "Son, I am going to heal you, and you are to take my healing power to your generation. You are to build me a university and build it on my authority and the Holy Spirit."
In 1936, 18-year-old Roberts began preaching at revivals as minister for Pentecostal Holiness Church. Two years later, he married Evelyn Lutman, a union that produced two sons and two daughters.
For nearly a decade, Roberts pastored several Oklahoma churches and preached at revivals while attending college. Then, he said, God spoke to him again, telling him not to be like other men but to "heal the people as He did." Roberts said he could feel the power to heal by the tingling of his right hand.
His first healing service drew a crowd of 1,200 people, and a few weeks later, a healing revival in Tulsa drew enough people to be extended for nine weeks.
During one of those nights, a gunman shot at Roberts, leaving a bullet hole in the canvas tent behind the preacher's head. The shooting was picked up by the media, giving Roberts his first burst of national publicity.
Anecdotal evidence of Roberts' alleged healings also made news as many of Roberts' followers claimed their aliments had disappeared during a revival. At his first healing service, a German woman reportedly said her right hand, crippled for 38 years, had been restored. Another evening, a blind man allegedly shouted, "I can see! I can see!"
During his ministry, no scientific studies confirmed Roberts' ability to heal.
Roberts soon began filling up stadiums or huge tents with 25,000 believers. The magazine he founded in 1947, Healing Waters (later renamed Abundant Life), quickly boasted a circulation of more than 1 million.
In a pattern that would continue over the years, Roberts' healing ministry was attacked by the media, skeptics and mainstream denominations. In the beginning of many crusades, a local Church of Christ would take out a newspaper ad offering a $1,000 reward for proof of a miracle performed by Roberts. When no one stepped forward to collect, the church would run an ad noting that "not one single case of miraculous divine healing can be produced."
In 1950, Roberts took a big step toward the mainstream of American Christianity when he was invited to say the opening prayer at a Billy Graham crusade after a chance meeting of the preachers at a Portland, Ore., hotel. "Graham's personal kindness, his glad and wholesome embrace of a fellow Christian, placed Oral momentarily in a larger, more respectable, world than he had ever imagined he could be a part of," according to the 1985 biography, "Oral Roberts: An American Life," by David Edwin Harrell Jr.
The preachers remained cordial over the years, though Roberts could never match the good press that Graham received.
Roberts came in for criticism in the 1950s when, occasionally, a worshiper would die during a crusade. Ministry spokesmen said the deaths were not unusual considering how many sick people were in attendance.
The minister was controversial for other reasons as well. In the days of segregation, Roberts, like Graham, insisted that black and white worshipers sit together, a progressive policy he said brought him death threats.
"We didn't think of being ahead of our time," Roberts recalled.
In 1954, Roberts became one of the first "televangelists," taping his crusades and then airing them on television stations across the nation. Within a year, Roberts' programs were being carried by more than 200 stations. By 1959, his ministry had built a seven-story office building in Tulsa to serve as its headquarters.
At the end of each show, Roberts didn't ask for money but told viewers to send a letter to Oral Roberts, Tulsa, Okla. Among the challenges of his booming enterprise was how to handle the thousands of letters that poured in each week. Again a trailblazer, he worked with IBM to develop one of the first computerized systems to immediately send out seemingly personalized letters.Among the projects he financed this way was what was originally called the Oral Roberts University of Evangelism, a school to educate the mind, body and spirit. His original idea was to train foreign students to deliver the Gospel throughout the world. That evolved into a vision of a full-scale university that would combine Bible teaching with academic and athletic programs.
In 1965, Oral Roberts University opened to 300 freshmen, and in 1971, the 263-acre college was accredited. By 1974, its men's basketball program got national notice for reaching NCAA tournament quarterfinals. Roberts, who played basketball in high school, served as the team's chief recruiter and occasionally rushed to the sidelines to pray for injured players.
Beginning in the 1960s, Roberts also was a major player in Tulsa civic life and served on the boards of the Bank of Oklahoma and Oklahoma Natural Gas.
As the end of the 1960s approached, Roberts' crusades drew dwindling numbers, a trend attributed to changing American tastes and Roberts' other priorities, such as the university. The sagging crusades received a final blow in 1968 when Roberts shocked his followers -- and Pentecostal Holiness church, sponsors of his events -- by becoming a Methodist minister.Roberts had grown tired of the restrictions of the Pentecostal Holiness Church. Methodists, for instance, would allow him more leeway in mixing secular elements like dancing into his television shows. It also was, for him, another move toward the mainstream and offered a large flock to lead.
In 1968, he ended his crusades and his long-running television show, though he didn't stay off the airwaves for long. The following year, he launched one-hour prime-time specials centered around celebrities like Pat Boone, Dale Evans, Anita Bryant, Robert Goulet, and Johnny and June Carter Cash. While many of Roberts' longtime supporters were appalled by what they saw as the secularization of Christianity, within three years nearly 40 million viewers were tuning into the prime-time specialsand they, along with his weekly Sunday show, generated 760,000 letters a month -- a gold mine of potential donors who were added to Roberts' increasingly sophisticated direct-mail database.
By this time, Roberts, a handsome, stocky man a little over 6 feet tall, had stopped wearing the flashy suits of his tent revival days in favor of tailored clothes -- a look more befitting a college president and esteemed television personality.
In 1970, he published "The Miracle of Seed-Faith," which promised financial riches for those who gave to God -- which he called planting a seed of faith. It was one of scores of books written by Roberts over his lifetime and quickly surpassed 1 million copies in distribution.
In 1975, Roberts announced plans for Oral Roberts University to build medical, dental and law schools. The annual budget for Oral Roberts Evangelical Assn. -- his umbrella organization -- approached $40 million. And he bought homes in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills, where he had a 17-room mansion from which he ran his West Coast operations.
In 1977, the first of a series of tragedies struck the Roberts' family when Roberts' 37-year-old daughter, Rebecca, and her husband, Marshall Nash, died in the crash of a private plane, leaving three children.
Roberts used the accident -- critics said in a calculating way -- in announcing plans for the City of Faith, Roberts' vision for a 777-bed hospital (he said 777 was the perfect biblical number), a 60-story clinic and diagnostic center and 20-story medical research center.
The complex would merge medicine and prayer, a holistic approach to healthcare that came out of Roberts' faith-healing background.
The City of Faith faced strong opposition in Tulsa, where healthcare providers and others said the project offered services already provided by the city's hospitals and doctors.
Roberts struggled to raise money for the complex, which opened while still under construction in 1982 and was completed six years later. By that time, by some estimates, its original price tag had doubled to $400 million and operating costs were high.
During one stretch in 1980 when funds were scarce, Roberts told donors about a vision he had while looking at the construction site.
"I felt an overwhelming holy presence all around me," Roberts recalled. "When I opened my eyes, there He stood some 900 feet tall, looking at me. There I was face-to-face with Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God."
Posters promptly popped up in Tulsa showing a traffic sign that read, "900 ft. Jesus Xing." Columnists, political cartoonists and comics all poked fun at Roberts' vision. Even many Christians expressed embarrassment or outrage.
"No decent Christian believed that Christ was 900 feet tall," Carl McIntire, a conservative Christian leader, said at the time.
The same year the City of Faith opened, Roberts' oldest son, Ronnie, committed suicide after a long battle with drugs and alcohol. Two years later, a grandson named for Roberts died shortly after birth, despite the minister's bedside prayers.
Through it all, Roberts said his faith never wavered.
"If Satan thought he had defeated us, he was 100% wrong," Roberts wrote in his autobiography.
He had other problems as well during this time. With competition from scores of new religious shows, Roberts' television ratings for his Sunday show declined even as the ministry needed more money for the City of Faith and other parts of his large operation.
In 1979, a former employee of Roberts wrote a tell-all book -- "Give Me That Old-Time Religion" -- about, among other things, the preacher's expensive personal tastes: Italian suits, diamond rings, a private jet, luxury homes, fancy cars, country club memberships. These reports renewed criticism in the media of Roberts' refusal to make public his ministry's financial books.
In 1983, former daughter-in-law Patti Roberts published a book in which she spoke of "huge amounts of money" made available to her and her former husband through the Roberts ministry.
At the same time, those close to him saw something else: the mellowing of a hard-driving man.
"He has known suffering in a very, very deep dimension," longtime friend Charles Farah told Roberts' biographer, Harrell. "There is something to the suffering of a human being that purifies him."
Despite negative publicity, by the mid-1980s the organization was raising more than $100 million annually and employing 2,300 people. Using a technique still used by televangelists and others today, Roberts send out small gifts -- for instance, small vials of oil said to bring healing miracles -- to people in exchange for a donation.
However, Roberts still struggled to cover his ministry's huge expenses, and in 1987, he made his "God will call me home" fundraising plea to raise $8 million for medical school scholarships at Oral Roberts University. Although his ministries were not implicated, the televangelist scandals of the 1980s also hurt Roberts' organization. The drop in donations forced Roberts to dramatically downsize his ministry, including selling four Mercedes-Benzes driven by family members and three vacation homes in California valued at $4 million.
Oral Roberts University dental school was closed in 1987. Two years later, the medical school and City of Faith medical center complex was shuttered.
In a 1989 interview, Tulsa Tribune editor Jenk Jones Jr. said Roberts "out-dreamed his reach."
Following his 1992 heart attack, Roberts turned over the presidency of Oral Roberts University to his son, Richard. But Richard Roberts resigned the post in 2007 amid allegations that he had spent university money on personal expenses at a time when the school was more than $50 million in debt.
The elder Roberts had continued to speak at charismatic churches and appear on televangelists' programs, especially those of fellow faith healer Benny Hinn. He also mentored Pentecostal preachers, including televangelist Kenneth Copeland and James Robison.
It was a quiet coda to a life that had unfolded in front of millions.
"All of Oral Roberts' life was controlled by two primal drives -- a relentless restlessness and a sense of divine calling," wrote biographer Harrell. "They were perhaps the same drive in secular and religious versions."
He is survived by his son Richard and his daughter Roberta Potts of Tulsa, 12 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.
The funeral will be private, with plans for a public memorial service pending.
His family requests donations to the Oral Roberts Ministry Healing Missions Fund, P.O. 2187, Tulsa, OK 74102, or online at www.OralRoberts.com
Lobdell is a former Times staff writer.
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