Saving Souls - Or a Ministry?
Oral Roberts says he has raised the dead
Wrestling Satan, reviving the dead and anointing wallets: A new gospel - according to Oral.Whatever Jesus Christ did, Oral Roberts thinks he can do - not better, perhaps, but almost as well. As the Tulsa televangelist tells it, he does a lot more than heal the sick. In the last six months he has fended off a death threat from God, who said he would summon Roberts "home" unless he raised $8 million. Had it not been for a last-minute cheque from a Florida dog-track owner, the Pentecostal preacher would have ascended to heaven. Then last spring, again like Jesus, he was manhandled by Satan in his Tulsa bedroom. And now Roberts has revealed a power that only his most faithful followers suspected he possessed: the ability to raise the dead. "I can't tell you about [all] the dead people I've raised," Roberts boasted to some 5,000 Pentecostals at a recent Charismatic Bible Ministry Conference.
The bizarre boast was yet another sign that the Roberts ministry needs a little raising itself. Of all the top televangelists, only Jim Bakker, the fallen star of the PTL, rates lower in public esteem. What's more, Roberts's claim to the ultimate in faith healing comes as bad news to his colleagues. Rocked by almost-daily accusations of sex, money or power scandals, the prime-time preachers can hardly afford another oracular outrage from the most visionary of the tele-anointed.
Does Oral Roberts really think he can bring back the dead? Well, yes and no. In a televised interview on his son's program, “Richard Roberts Live" the famed healer recounted how he had revived a dead child before 10,000 witnesses. During a healing service, he recalled, a mother in the audience jumped up and shouted, "My baby's dead." Roberts said he prayed over the child and "it jerked, it jerked in my hand." But that was more than 20 years ago, and Roberts conceded that neither that child nor others he said he had brought back to life had been pronounced clinically dead. "I understand," he hedged, "there's a difference in a person dying and not breathing and [a person] being declared clinically dead."
Despite such explanations, the damage was done. James Dobson, president of the National Association of Christian Psychotherapists and Counsellors Inc., said Roberts's claims showed "the need for a serious psychiatric examination. He's killing his ministry." But University of Alabama historian David E. Harrell Jr., a devout Pentecostal and biographer of Roberts, insists that the 69-year-old evangelist is not losing his wits. "Oral gets depressed," says Harrell. "And when he gets depressed, that's when God speaks to him."
Roberts has good reasons for feeling depressed. Donations are declining, bills are mounting, his television audience is shrinking and the core of his "prayer partners", as he calls his donors, is approaching retirement age.
Underneath these signs of decline, says Harrell, lies Roberts's sense of having failed in his quest for respectability. Twenty years ago Roberts abandoned his faith-healing Pentecostal roots when he became a Methodist, joined a country club and built Oral Roberts University. Now the Methodists are considering revoking their accreditation of ORU's theology school reportedly because the curriculum is being tilted toward independent charismatic theology. "All those years that Oral behaved himself," observes Harrell, "he was not getting the kind of broad support he was looking for, so he went back to his radical charismatic following."
Windows of heaven: Now the ageing evangelist seems torn between satisfying two desperate constituencies: older - and poorer - Pentecostals who truly believe that Roberts can work such wonders as raising the dead, and younger, upwardly mobile charismatic Christians who want miracles of wealth more than health. Influenced by more worldly second-generation television preachers, Roberts has lately adapted himself to the "Name it and claim it" gospel. According to insiders, this school stresses the belief that God rewards faith with material blessings. Richard epitomised the new appeal last March when, at the height of his father's desperate campaign to raise $8 million, the younger Roberts urged viewers to "sow a seed on your MasterCard, your Visa or your American Express, and then when you do, expect God to open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing."
Such desperate efforts are only likely to confirm the more sceptical public's view that televangelists are not to be trusted. According to the latest Gallup survey, 63 percent of Americans regard TV preachers as "untrustworthy with money". More than half (53 percent) consider them honest - the exact reverse of a similar poll taken in 1980. And perhaps most damaging of all to healers like Roberts, only 30 percent believe that televangelists "have a special relationship with God.”
Even so, Oral Roberts foresees a bright future for himself - if not in this life, then in the next. Like other born-again Christians, he expects to return to earth with Jesus at the Second Coming and help run things in God's millennial kingdom. "I get a picture in my head that He's going to position us to rule and reign," Oral declared at his conference of charismatic ministers. "Maybe we'll have more power in the second try." But Oral's not fixing to reign in Jerusalem or even Washington D.C. He'd be perfectly happy, he says, just to preside again over the 400 acres of Oral Roberts University - this time fiscally sound.
Kenneth L. Woodward with
Frank Gibney Jr. in Tulsa
Source: ‘Newsweek', 13th July, 1987
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