ORAL ROBERTS

Roberts was born in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, the fifth and youngest child of the Rev. Ellis Melvin Roberts and Claudia Priscilla Irwin.

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Roberts originally made a name for himself with a mobile big tent "that sat 3,000 on metal folding chairs" where "he shouted at petitioners who did not respond to his healing."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

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 were many people healed in this manner.

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.

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.

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.

In 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" (a euphemism for death). Some were fearful that he was referring to suicide given the passionate pleas and tear that accompanied his statement. He raised $9.1 million. Later that year, he announced that God had raised the dead through Roberts' ministry.

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 skies above the United States and then spread out across America.

When his son, Richard Roberts, took a leave of absence from his position as President of Oral Roberts University on October 17, 2007 following allegations of misappropriation of school funds, Oral announced he would return to help fulfill this administrative role 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. Richard resigned his position on November 24, 2007.

Roberts' daughter, Rebecca Nash, died in a plane crash on February 11, 1977, with her husband, businessman Marshall Nash. Roberts' eldest son, Ronald, committed suicide in June 1982 at the age of 37 five months after receiving a court order to get counseling at a drug treatment center. Two other children of Roberts are living: son Richard, a well-known evangelist and former president of Oral Roberts University (ORU), and daughter Roberta Potts, a lawyer. 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. Although the lawsuit is still in process, the university has submitted to an outside audit, and with a clear report was then given a $70 million dollar donation.

From the late 1980's to 1992 Roberts maintained a residence in the exclusive St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida. 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 in a Southern California hospital at the age of 88.

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 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.

Oral Roberts' life story, as told by himself. Tulsa, Okla. 1952.

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When You See the Invisible, You Can Do the Impossible

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