Oral Roberts

1918–2009AmericanPentecostal Holiness

A stuttering Oklahoma teenager healed of tuberculosis who put healing meetings on television and built a university out of them.

Summary

Oral Roberts lived 1918–2009, and was American. This wing places Oral Roberts in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World, 1930–today.

Lived 1918–2009, American.
Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
Hangs on The Revivalists.
Tradition: Pentecostal Holiness / Methodist.

The life

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.

What was happening while he lived8 moments · 1930–today

May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
Autumn 1989Candles in Leipzig, and the wall comes downMonday peace prayers had gathered for years at the Nikolaikirche under pastor Christian Führer. On October 9 about seventy thousand people, the figure the city's own contemporary reports give, walked out of that neighborhood carrying candles past armed police, and not a shot was fired. The Berlin Wall opened a month later, on November 9.

The Church Under Fire & Into All the World: the whole era→

Go further

Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.

Search Oral Roberts at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites

Why this one hangs here

Healed of tuberculosis at seventeen, he put the prayer line on television and built an accredited university out of a tent ministry.

Hangs on The Revivalists: The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed.

On the wall

Era: The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today)

Hangs in: The Revivalists

The years he lived in

The Church Under Fire & Into All the World 1930–today

Two counts of the twentieth century's Christian dead are in circulation and they are built differently, so the page gives both. David Barrett and Todd Johnson put the figure near forty-five million in the World Christian Encyclopedia, first edition 1982 and second edition 2001. They counted every believer whose life was cut short by human hostility. That takes in whole populations killed in wars and famines where faith was one cause among several. Thomas Schirrmacher, working for the International Institute for Religious Freedom, puts the yearly figure near seven to eight thousand, counting only deaths documented case by case as killings for confessing Christ. Barrett and Johnson's own Center for the Study of Global Christianity revised the annual rate down in the third edition of 2019. The wide number and the narrow number measure two different things, and even the narrow one is large. The same century saw the church grow faster than it ever had. Both are true of the same hundred years.

The whole era →

Known for

The tent healing campaigns from 1947, in tents seating up to 12,500
Taking healing services onto national television from 1954
Founding Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, opened 1965

Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall

Corrie ten Boom1892–1983

Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.

Maximilian Kolbe1894–1941

Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.

C.S. Lewis1898–1963

The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.

Wang Mingdao1900–1991

Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.

Eric Liddell1902–1945

Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.

Watchman Nee1903–1972

Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.