By Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird
-an article for the Light Magazine ‘Healing Pioneers’
series
During his
lifetime, Oral Roberts was the most famous Christian evangelist, next to Billy
Graham. In the 1980s, he was so
well-known that he was recognized by 84 percent of Americans.
His rallies
were really two parallel crusades on the same evening. Like his hero Billy
Graham, Oral would spend the first half of his Crusades preaching the gospel
message and giving an altar call for salvation. His wife Evelyn Roberts said:
“Two thirds of the people sitting in our tents were not saved. They did not
know Jesus.” Then in the second half of the Crusade, he would speak about the
healing ministry and pray specifically for the sick. Many who came being curious about the miracle
healings ended up giving their lives to Christ.
Billy and
Oral first met in Portland Oregon where Billy invited Oral to open his Crusade
in prayer. Oral initially said no, telling
Billy that his healing ministry was seen as controversial. Billy responded, saying that it was not
controversial to him. He explained that
he did not pray for the sick in his Billy Graham Crusades because he did not
have that healing gift like Oral did. Billy went on to say that he had
privately attended Oral Roberts crusade where a sick relative was healed. They went on to develop a good
friendship. Billy Graham spoke at the
official opening of the Oral Roberts University: “ORU’s founder and first
president was a man who was an evangelist first and always of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ.”
Born in
1918, Oral Roberts, as the son of a very poor Pentecostal pastor, wanted
nothing to do with church. Poor and starving as a teenager, he left home with
his basketball coach, seeking to become a basketball star. Being a workaholic, he only slept two hours a
night. His goal was to become a lawyer and the Governor of Oklahoma. In the middle of a basketball game, he
collapsed from tuberculosis. In those
days, TB was virtually a death sentence.
They sent him back home to die. But his older brother took him to George
Moncey’s tent meeting in July 1935 where he was supernaturally healed from
tuberculosis. Even though he was instantly healed, it still took him time to
regain his full strength. This
miraculous healing left Oral with a deep sense that he was called to heal
others. He said: “If God healed me, who
am I to doubt what He will do for someone else.” However, it took twelve years before his
healing ministry was launched.
In the
spring of 1948, Oral was conducting a one-night crusade in Nowata,
Oklahoma. While praying for a deaf young
boy, the Lord said to Oral, “Son, you have been faithful up to this hour, and
now you will feel My presence in your right hand. Through My presence, you will
be able to detect demons, and through My power they will be cast out.” Suddenly,
Oral felt a burning sensation traveling down his right arm to his right hand.
His hand was throbbing as though there was an electric current flowing through
it. After Oral placed his hands on the boy’s ear, he felt the Lord’s power
surge through his right hand. Turning
the boy away from his mother so that the boy could not see her mouth, Oral
asked her to speak to her son. The young boy heard every word that his mother
uttered!
A few days
later, Oral spoke at a church in Tulsa. At the end of the service, Irma Morris who
had tuberculosis came forward. Feeling God’s purpose surge in his right hand,
he commanded the TB to loose her body and set her free in the name of Jesus.
“Oh, Oral, what did you do to me?” she cried. “Your right hand. It felt on fire
when you touched me....Something in your right hand is causing a warmth to go
through my lungs. My lungs are opening up. I believe I am being healed!” From
this moment, Oral went on to teach about the importance of a point of contact
in healing: “When I lay my right hand upon you, let that be a point of contact
and believe.” Oral went on to pray individually with one and a half million
people. One participant said: “ It felt
like walking through the pages of the book of Acts.” In praying for so many people, Oral suffered
from repetitive stress injury, breaking his right shoulder twice, and his left
shoulder twice.
Oral’s
experience of healing convinced him that God is a good God. This is why he
often said, “Something good is going to happen to you.” He believed that the best was yet to
come. As people discovered the goodness
of God, they began to expect miracles to happen.
Oral
Roberts had unusual favour in ministering healing to many First Nations people.
With his mother being Cherokee, and Oral holding Choctaw Nation membership, he
understood the suffering on the Trail of Tears.
In August 1955, Roberts conducted a Native American Healing Crusade on
the Crow Reservation in Montana. In 1963, he was awarded The Outstanding
Native American of the Year award.
Rev. Roberts
brought significant breakthrough in the area of racism: “In many places,
misguided Christians picketed and paraded outside our tent because I refused to
segregate the altar of God.” In 1953, Roberts was told that people planned to
kill him if he desegregated seating in his meetings. He announced, “Anyone who
comes to our tent can sit where you want to sit.” Roberts observed, “[Afro-Americans] have been
the victims of more mistreatment and racial bias than any other peoples in
modern history.” As a pioneer in Christian TV, Roberts’ first primetime TV show
in 1969 featured the black gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, this at a time when
blacks were ‘invisible’ in American religious broadcasting.
He also
built the ORU university representing 114 nations, with 14 percent
Afro-American, 14 Hispanic and 16 percent international student. The majority of ORU students in the 1970s
were converted hippies who had joined the Jesus Movement. Oral knew in the birth of ORU that his calling
was not just to heal bodies but also to transform minds. God wanted us to be
whole persons in body, mind and spirit. They
had a slogan at ORU: Get your learning while you keep your burning. With 25,000
having graduated so far from Oral Roberts University, ORU may be his greatest
legacy. With Roberts moving from the
Pentecostal Holiness to the Methodist Church, this symbolized Roberts’ desire
to impact the Church interdenominationally. God gave him unusual favour with
key renewal leaders like Francis MacNutt and Rev. Michael Harper.
In 1948,
only one percent owned a TV set. But by
1953, fifty-three percent owned a TV. So Roberts in 1954 began broadcasting his
10,000+-strong tent meetings to millions of viewers. He made use of TV to make the healing
ministry accessible to ordinary people.
Oral wrote fifty
books, selling over fifty million copies.
His Healing Waters/Abundant Life magazine at its peak reached one
million people per month. His house was full of letters. He hired 300 letter readers to write
responses to the letter writers. In the early 1970s, Oral Roberts received
nearly six million letters a year. John Lennon of the Beatles wrote Oral
Roberts saying that he enjoyed Oral’s TV show.
He also said that he hated being under the influence of drugs: “Maybe if
I had a father like you, I would have been a better person.”
Oral’s
strong, 66-year marriage with his wife Evelyn was one of the keys to his
lasting impact. As a child, Evelyn stated
that she would never marry a pastor because in those days, it was a life of
grinding poverty. As a trained teacher, she had the courage to speak into
Oral’s life, protecting him from the many pitfalls and scandals that easily
take out highly successful leaders. Often,
she would sit in the front row of his meetings and correct him publicly if he
recalled details incorrectly in his stories. Her unwavering loyalty and wisdom
protected Oral during the deeply painful family crises of their daughter Rebecca’s
1977 plane crash death, their son Ronnie’s drug-related suicide in 1982, and their son Richard’s divorce.
Oral had
supernatural gifts of faith and generosity (1 Corinthians 12:9; Romans 12:8). Because God had been so generous to him, he
was inspired to be deeply generous to others. His joyful generosity, which he called ‘seed faith’ or sowing and reaping, inspired millions of other people
to grow in their giving to God through tithing and sacrificial giving. Being a selfish Christian is a contradiction
in terms. Oral realized that God blesses our generosity so that we can keep
growing in generosity to others.
As Jesus said in Acts 20:35, it is more blessed to give than
receive. Such generosity birthed ORU
against all odds, with now 5,000 students. When facing innumerable challenges at ORU, he
would walk between buildings and proclaim, “The same God who lifted me from the
death bed, will sustain this university.”
In our
greatest strengths are often hidden our greatest weaknesses. We are grateful for Oral’s generosity. He had great faith for healing through both medicine
and prayer, symbolized by ORU’s large bronze sculpture Healing Hands . Rather than medicine and healing prayer being
opposites, Oral saw them as two hands joined together. This led him in 1981 to
start a 60-story medical school costing millions of dollars. When the building
debts piled up, Oral in 1986 said that the Lord would ‘call him home’ if the
medical bills were not paid. Remarkably,
the money came in, but Oral had to close and sell the medical building in 1989 because
of operating debt. We regret this incident
which had many people giving out of fear and guilt. When people initially give because ‘the sky
is falling’, they often suffer from donor exhaustion when the financial
problems keep re-emerging. Only love and
gratitude are sufficient reasons to not grow weary in being biblically
generous. Either way, Oral was a healing
pioneer from which we can all learn much.
May we be
willing, like Oral Roberts, to embrace the goodness of God who is still the
same yesterday, today and forever.
Rev. Dr. Ed
& Janice Hird, co-authors, God’s
Firestarters
