Oral Roberts, Pentecostal televangelist, Died at 91

  Dead Famous

Dead, Granville Oral Roberts on December 15, 2009 at the age of 91, he was an American Methodist-Pentecostal televangelist and a Christian charismatic. He founded the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association and Oral Roberts University.

Born on January 24, 1918, in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, the fifth and youngest child of the Reverend Ellis Melvin Roberts and Claudius Priscilla Roberts (née Irwin) (d. 1974).

According to an interview on Larry King Live, Irwin was of Cherokee descent.

Roberts was a card-carrying member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Roberts began life in poverty and nearly died of tuberculosis at age 17.

After finishing high school, Roberts studied for two years each at Oklahoma Baptist University and Phillips University.

In November 1947, he started Healing Waters, a monthly magazine as a means to promote his meetings.

Thousands of sick people would wait in line to stand before Oral Roberts so he could pray for them.

He appeared as a guest speaker for hundreds of national and international meetings and conventions.

Through the years, he conducted more than 300 crusades on six continents, and personally laid hands in prayer on more than 2 million people.

He also ran direct mail campaigns of seed-faith, which appealed to poor Americans, often from ethnic minorities.

At its peak in the early 1980s, Roberts was the leader of a $120 million-a-year organization employing 2,300 people.

In 1977, Roberts claimed to have had 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 Centre in Oklahoma, which opened in 1981.

At the time, it was among the largest health facilities of its kind in the world and was intended to merge prayer and medicine in the healing process.

The City of Faith operated for only eight years before closing in late 1989, but the importance of treating the whole person – spirit, mind, and body – was conveyed to many medical professionals.

The Orthopaedic 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.

The school fronts on South Lewis Avenue between East 75th Street and East 81st Street in South Tulsa.

Sitting on a 263-acre (1.06 km2) campus, ORU offers over 65 undergraduate degree programs along with a number of master’s and doctoral degrees.

ORU is classified as Master’s University by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

ORU was also ranked as one of 123 institutions in the 2012 “Best in the West” regional list produced by The Princeton Review.

He was the patriarch of the “prosperity gospel,” a theology that promotes the idea that Christians who pray and donate with sufficient fervency will be rewarded with health, wealth and happiness.

Mr. Roberts trained and mentored several generations of younger prosperity gospel preachers who now have television and multimedia empires of their own.