The 700 Club

The 700 Club was not originally conceived as a program at all. On December 8, 1962, Pat Robertson, three years into building the Christian Broadcasting Network out of a single struggling UHF station in Portsmouth, Virginia, held a telethon asking for 700 viewers willing to pledge ten dollars a month, enough between them to cover the network's entire budget for the coming year. The number outlived the specific fundraising drive that produced it.

By 1966 Robertson had turned the idea into something durable: a daily program built around prayer, on air ministry and a telephone response system that let viewers call in for counsel while the broadcast was still running, an interactive format that was genuinely unusual for religious television at the time. He named it The 700 Club after the original pledge drive and hosted it himself, most weekdays, for the next fifty five years.

Robertson's retirement from the daily hosting chair in 2021, two years before his death in 2023, closed one of the longest continuous on air runs in American broadcast history; his son Gordon Robertson has hosted the program since. The 700 Club is regularly credited, alongside Trinity Broadcasting Network's own early programming, with establishing that a religious broadcast could sustain a daily national audience on its own terms rather than only during scheduled Sunday service hours, a format choice much of the televangelism that followed would copy directly.