Oral Roberts

Granville Oral Roberts was born January 24, 1918, near Ada, Oklahoma, the son of a Pentecostal Holiness preacher. A conversion experience at 17, followed by what he described as a healing from tuberculosis, set the course of his ministry: divine healing, demonstrated in public, would remain its center for the rest of his life.

Roberts founded the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1947 and spent the following years touring the country in tent revivals, praying individually over the sick in meetings that could run for hours. Television let him take the format further than any tent could reach. Oral Roberts and You brought filmed healing lines into American living rooms, making him the first evangelist to lead large televised healing crusades and, by his organization's own count, someone who personally prayed over 1,500,000 people across his career.

He used the income and visibility of the crusades to build institutions rather than simply sustain them. Oral Roberts University opened in Tulsa in 1963, and the City of Faith Medical and Research Center, a hospital and research complex intended to combine prayer with modern medicine, followed in the 1980s at a completed cost of about 150,000,000 dollars against a full planned build reported at up to 250,000,000 dollars. The City of Faith closed in 1989, having reportedly drained the organization of 30,000,000 to 40,000,000 dollars a year, a scale of ambition and a scale of financial strain that together defined Roberts as clearly as the healing lines that made him famous.

Roberts taught what he called Seed Faith: a gift given to God, likened to a seed planted in soil, would be met with a multiplied return to the giver. The teaching reframed fundraising itself as an act of faith rather than a request, and it became one of the clearest templates for the broader prosperity gospel that followed him, from Word of Faith teachers in the 1970s to the satellite ministries of the 1980s and beyond.

The teaching's most publicized moment came in January 1987, when Roberts told his television audience that he needed 8,000,000 dollars for a medical scholarship program by a stated deadline, and that he believed God would call him home if the goal was not met. He began a fasting and prayer vigil on March 22, 1987, broadcasting daily appeals until the sum was raised, reportedly with a late and decisive gift from a Florida dog track owner. The campaign drew sustained criticism, including from within evangelicalism, as an example of fundraising pressure dressed as prophecy, a charge Roberts rejected but never fully escaped for the rest of his public life.

Roberts died of pneumonia, following a fall, on December 15, 2009, in Newport Beach, California, at age 91. Oral Roberts University continues to operate in Tulsa, and Seed Faith remains a live teaching across the prosperity gospel ministries that trace their fundraising language back to his television broadcasts.