Oral Roberts: Two Folded Healing Hands

‘Healing Pioneers’ series

During his lifetime, Oral Roberts was the most famous Christian evangelist, next to Billy Graham. In the 1980s, he was so well-known that he was recognized by 84 percent of Americans. His rallies were really two parallel crusades on the same evening. Like his hero Billy Graham, Roberts would spend the first half of his Crusades preaching the gospel message and giving an altar call for salvation. His wife Evelyn said: “Two thirds of the people sitting in our tents were not saved. They did not know Jesus.” Then in the second half of the Crusade, he would speak about the healing ministry and pray specifically for the sick. Many who came being curious about the miracle healings ended up giving their lives to Christ.

Billy Graham and Oral Roberts first met in Portland Oregon where Graham invited Roberts to open his Crusade in prayer. Roberts initially said no, telling Graham that his healing ministry was seen as controversial. Graham responded, saying that it was not controversial to him. He explained that he did not pray for the sick in his Billy Graham Crusades because he did not have that healing gift like Roberts did. Graham went on to say that he had privately attended Oral Roberts crusade where a sick relative was healed. They went on to develop a good friendship. Graham spoke at the official opening of the Oral Roberts University: “ORU’s founder and first president was a man who was an evangelist first and always of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Born in 1918, Oral Roberts, as the son of a very poor Pentecostal pastor, wanted nothing to do with church. Poor and starving as a teenager, he left home with his basketball coach, seeking to become a basketball star. Being a workaholic, he only slept two hours a night. His goal was to become a lawyer and the Governor of Oklahoma. In the middle of a basketball game, he collapsed from tuberculosis. In those days, TB was virtually a death sentence. They sent him back home to die. But his older brother took him to George Moncey’s tent meeting in July 1935 where he was supernaturally healed from tuberculosis. Even though he was instantly healed, it still took him time to regain his full strength. This miraculous healing left Roberts with a deep sense that he was called to heal others. He said: “If God healed me, who am I to doubt what He will do for someone else.” However, it took 12 years before his healing ministry was launched.

In the spring of 1948, Roberts was conducting a one-night crusade in Nowata, Oklahoma. While praying for a deaf young boy, the Lord said to him, “Son, you have been faithful up to this hour, and now you will feel My presence in your right hand. Through My presence, you will be able to detect demons, and through My power they will be cast out.” Suddenly, Roberts felt a burning sensation travelling down his right arm to his right hand. His hand was throbbing as though there was an electric current flowing through it. After Roberts placed his hands on the boy’s ear, he felt the Lord’s power surge through his right hand. Turning the boy away from his mother so that the boy could not see her mouth, Oral asked her to speak to her son. The young boy heard every word that his mother uttered!

A few days later, Roberts spoke at a church in Tulsa. At the end of the service, Irma Morris who had tuberculosis came forward. Feeling God’s purpose surge in his right hand, he commanded the TB to loose her body and set her free in the name of Jesus. “Oh, Oral, what did you do to me?” she cried. “Your right hand. It felt on fire when you touched me….Something in your right hand is causing a warmth to go through my lungs. My lungs are opening up. I believe I am being healed!” From this moment, Roberts went on to teach about the importance of a point of contact in healing: “When I lay my right hand upon you, let that be a point of contact and believe.” Roberts went on to pray individually with one and a half million people. One participant said: “It felt like walking through the pages of the book of Acts.” In praying for so many people, Oral suffered from repetitive stress injury, breaking his right shoulder twice, and his left shoulder twice.

Roberts’ experience of healing convinced him that God is a good God. This is why he often said, “Something good is going to happen to you.” He believed that the best was yet to come. As people discovered the goodness of God, they began to expect miracles to happen. 

Roberts had unusual favour in ministering healing to many First Nations people. With his mother being Cherokee, and Roberts holding Choctaw Nation membership, he understood the suffering on the Trail of Tears. In August 1955, Roberts conducted a Native American Healing Crusade on the Crow Reservation in Montana. In 1963, he was awarded The Outstanding Native American of the Year award. 

Roberts brought significant breakthrough in the area of racism: “In many places, misguided Christians picketed and paraded outside our tent because I refused to segregate the altar of God.” In 1953, Roberts was told that people planned to kill him if he desegregated seating in his meetings. He announced, “Anyone who comes to our tent can sit where you want to sit.” Roberts observed, “[Afro-Americans] have been the victims of more mistreatment and racial bias than any other peoples in modern history.” As a pioneer in Christian TV, Roberts’ first primetime TV show in 1969 featured the black gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, this at a time when blacks were ‘invisible’ in American religious broadcasting. 

He also built the ORU university representing 114 nations, with 14 percent Afro-American, 14 percent Hispanic and 16 percent international student. The majority of ORU students in the 1970s were converted hippies who had joined the Jesus Movement. Roberts knew in the birth of ORU that his calling was not just to heal bodies but also to transform minds. God wanted us to be whole persons in body, mind and spirit. They had a slogan at ORU: Get your learning while you keep your burning. With 25,000 having graduated so far from Oral Roberts University, ORU may be his greatest legacy. With Roberts moving from the Pentecostal Holiness to the Methodist Church, this symbolized Roberts’ desire to impact the Church interdenominationally. God gave him unusual favour with key renewal leaders like Francis MacNutt and Rev. Michael Harper.

In 1948, only one percent owned a TV set. But by 1953, fifty-three percent owned a TV. So, Roberts in 1954 began broadcasting his 10,000+ strong tent meetings to millions of viewers. He made use of TV to make the healing ministry accessible to ordinary people.

Roberts wrote fifty books, selling over fifty million copies.  His Healing Waters/Abundant Life magazine at its peak reached one million people per month. His house was full of letters. He hired 300 letter readers to write responses to the letter writers. In the early 1970s, Oral Roberts received nearly six million letters a year. John Lennon of the Beatles wrote Oral Roberts saying that he enjoyed Roberts’ TV show. He also said that he hated being under the influence of drugs: “Maybe if I had a father like you, I would have been a better person.”

Roberts’ strong, 66-year marriage with his wife Evelyn was one of the keys to his lasting impact.  As a child, Evelyn stated that she would never marry a pastor because in those days, it was a life of grinding poverty. As a trained teacher, she had the courage to speak into Roberts’ life, protecting him from the many pitfalls and scandals that easily take out highly successful leaders. Often, she would sit in the front row of his meetings and correct him publicly if he recalled details incorrectly in his stories. Her unwavering loyalty and wisdom protected Roberts during the deeply painful family crises of their daughter Rebecca’s 1977 plane crash death, their son Ronnie’s drug-related suicide in 1982, and their son Richard’s divorce.

Roberts had supernatural gifts of faith and generosity (1 Corinthians 12:9; Romans 12:8). Because God had been so generous to him, he was inspired to be deeply generous to others. His generosity, which he called ‘seed faith’, inspired millions of other people to grow in their giving to God through tithing and sacrificial giving. Being a selfish Christian is a contradiction in terms. Robert’s realized that God blesses our generosity so that we can keep growing in generosity to others. As Jesus said in Acts 20:35, it is more blessed to give than receive. Such generosity birthed ORU against all odds, with now 5,000 students.  When facing innumerable challenges at ORU, he would walk between buildings and proclaim, “The same God who lifted me from the death bed, will sustain this university.”

In our greatest strengths are often hidden our greatest weaknesses. We are grateful for Roberts’ generosity. He had great faith for healing through both medicine and prayer, symbolized by ORU’s large bronze sculpture Healing Hands. Rather than medicine and healing prayer being opposites, Roberts saw them as two hands joined together. This led him in 1981 to start a 60-story medical school costing millions of dollars. When the building debts piled up, Roberts in 1986 said that the Lord would ‘call him home’ if the medical bills were not paid. Remarkably, the money came in, but Roberts had to close and sell the medical building in 1989 because of operating debt. We regret this incident which had many people giving out of fear and guilt. When people initially give because ‘the sky is falling’, they often suffer from donor exhaustion when the financial problems keep re-emerging. Only love and gratitude are sufficient reasons to not grow weary in being biblically generous. Either way, Roberts was a healing pioneer from whom we can all learn much.

May we be willing, like Oral Roberts, to embrace the goodness of God who is still the same yesterday, today and forever.