Oral Roberts

Oral Roberts grew up poor in Oklahoma, stuttered badly, and collapsed with tuberculosis at seventeen; he said he was healed at a tent meeting his brother drove him to, and that both the disease and the stutter left him. He preached for a decade in small Pentecostal churches, then in 1947 started the tent campaigns that made him famous, praying for people one at a time in the prayer line for hours. He was the first to put such meetings on television, which brought him a national audience and a permanent stream of critics.

He built a university in Tulsa that won full accreditation, and in 1968 joined the Methodist church, taking his kind of ministry into the mainline. His late years brought the failures too: a medical center that closed under its debts, and a 1987 television appeal saying God would call him home if the money did not come in, which even friendly observers called a mistake. He died in 2009 at ninety-one.