PENTECOSTAL ROOTS OF ORAL ROBERTS’ HEALING MINISTRY
History Interest Group
Vinson Synan
Oral Roberts University
Presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies
It could truly be said that Oral Roberts was a son of the Pentecostal Movement and a father of the Charismatic Movement.
Born in 1918 and raised in the home of Ellis and Claudia Roberts, Pentecostal Holiness ministers, Roberts’ formation was in classical Pentecostalism. The only exception was the seven years after he joined the Methodist Church in Stratford, Oklahoma, and a few months as a teenager when he also joined the Atoka, Oklahoma, Methodist Church along with the entire basketball team. After almost dying from tuberculosis, he was healed in 1935 and returned to the Pentecostal Holiness Church where he flourished as an evangelist and pastor until 1947. In that year he began his healing ministry under huge tents that made him a national figure. By 1954, he went on television and became a household name as millions watched his dynamic sermons and his healing lines. His national television ministry planted the seeds of the Charismatic movement that broke out in all the mainline churches after 1960.
Perhaps the climactic event in his entire life was when Roberts was healed of severe tuberculosis in 1935. The first sign of his illness was when he fell on the floor playing basketball in Atoka, Oklahoma, hemorrhaging blood. He was taken from there to his home in Stratford, Oklahoma, where he lay bedridden coughing up blood and wasting away for 163 days.
During these days he was finally converted due to the passionate prayers of his father and mother. Before this, despite the prayers of his father, Oral had left home and lived a dissolute life in high school before falling ill. All of this changed when Elmer Roberts, Oral’s older brother, took him to a tent meeting in nearby Ada, Oklahoma, where a Church of God of Prophecy evangelist, George W. Moncey, was holding a healing crusade. For the first time, Oral saw a healing line where Moncey’s hands were laid on over 200 persons. After the prayer line ended, Moncey came to where Oral was sitting and said the unforgettable words: “O Lord heal this boy”…. and then he said, “You foul tormenting disease, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, come out of this boy. Loose him and let him go free.”
Immediately Oral said that:
“I felt the power of the Lord. It was like your hand striking me, like electricity going through me. It went into my lungs, went into my tongue, and all at once I could breathe. I could breathe all the way down. Before that when I tried to breathe all the way down I would hemorrhage.”
This was the great turning point in Oral Roberts’ life which would soon lead him into the Pentecostal Holiness ministry as pastor and evangelist and later into a worldwide healing ministry that would change the face of Christianity in the twentieth century.
RED LETTER DAYS
It was a red-letter day for the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in the life of Oral Roberts when the dedication of the gleaming new Oral Roberts University took place on April 2, 1967. Over 18,000 friends came to hear Billy Graham dedicate the University while Oral’s Bishop from the Pentecostal Holiness Church, Joseph A. Synan, read the Scriptures. The presence of these two men on the platform spoke volumes about Roberts’ recent rise from the Pentecostal subculture in Oklahoma to become a world renowned religious leader with millions of followers. After being lionized at Billy Graham’s Berlin Congress for evangelists in 1966, Roberts invited the famous Graham to dedicate his University.
Another red-letter day occurred on November 1, 1981, when Roberts dedicated his City of Faith hospital before a crowd of 13,000 followers who gathered in the nearby Mabee Center due to torrential rains outside. Instead of Billy Graham, Roberts’ Charismatic friends filled the platform including such luminaries as Demos Shakarian, Pat Robertson, and Oklahoma Governor George Nigh, who assisted in the dedication. Also on the platform was the Methodist educator, Dr. Jimmy Buskirk, who Oral Roberts tapped to head the new ORU School of Theology after joining the Methodist Church in 1968.
These two events highlighted the two major periods in Oral Roberts’ life; his ministry as a Pentecostal Holiness evangelist and pastor, and his life as a Methodist leader in the burgeoning charismatic movement. Indeed, after becoming a well-known healing evangelist, Roberts claimed that his ministry began in 1947 when he held his first healing crusade in his hometown of Enid, Oklahoma. But as a matter of fact, Roberts’ ministry began on the very night he was healed of tuberculosis in 1935. After the healing prayer by George Moncey, Roberts sprang to his feet, ran across the platform and exclaimed “Í’m healed. I’m healed” and preached his first sermon. He later said that the Lord spoke to him that very night saying, “Son, I am going to heal you and you are going to take my healing power to your generation. You must build me a university and build it on my authority and the Holy Spirit.”
ORAL ROBERTS AND THE PENTECOSTAL HOLINESS CHURCH
After he regained his strength, Roberts joined his father in preaching local revivals where his audiences were amazed at his eloquence although he had stuttered badly since childhood. After this, Oral went on to be licensed to preach in 1936 and ordained to the Pentecostal Holiness ministry in 1937. In a few short years, Roberts gained attention as an effective evangelist preaching all over the nation and in faraway Canada. His meetings attracted overflow crowds with many hundreds converted.
He also published two books that helped to put him on the denominational map. They were Salvation by the Blood in 1938, and the Drama of the End-Times in 1941, both published by the Pentecostal Holiness Church. In addition to this, he was elected to represent his East Oklahoma Conference in the denomination’s General Conferences in Franklin Springs, Georgia, 1941 and in Oklahoma City in 1945. All this marked young Roberts as a young rising star in the Pentecostal Holiness Church.
During these years, although Roberts regularly testified to his healing experience in 1935, he seemed to be more interested in evangelism and prophecy than in divine healing. His sermons bristled with expositions and defenses of the five “cardinal doctrines” taught by the Pentecostal Holiness Church, i.e. salvation, sanctification, baptism in the Holy Spirit with the initial evidence of speaking in tongues, divine healing as in the atonement, and the imminent second coming of Christ. He also became a master of the dynamic Pentecostal style of preaching. Two of his models were Joseph Synan, his Bishop, and G. H. Montgomery, Editor of the Pentecostal Holiness Advocate, both of whom honed their skills in camp meetings and revivals in local churches. At this point Roberts was clearly a creature of his denomination.
For six years, from 1941 to 1947, Roberts pastored Pentecostal Holiness congregations in Shawnee, and Enid in Oklahoma as well as in Toccoa, Georgia, and Fuqua Springs-Varina in North Carolina. He was successful and dissatisfied at the same time as a local pastor. All the churches grew under his leadership and his pay rose to one of the highest levels in the church. It was in the parsonage of the Enid Pentecostal Holiness Church that Roberts received his definite call to the healing ministry in 1947. He said that he heard the Lord say, “Son, don’t be like other men, don’t be like any other denomination. Be like Jesus, and heal the people as he did.” It was also in Enid that he held his first healing service which eventually launched him into becoming one of the most popular evangelists in the history of the United States.
In 1947 Oral Roberts published his third book, If You Need Healing – Do These Things and the next year began publication of his monthly magazine Healing Waters. At the same time he purchased his first “Tent Cathedral” which seated some 3,000 persons. He later bought a much larger tent that seated 12,500. In May 1951, Roberts was featured along with Billy Graham in Life magazine as “the loudest and splashiest revivalist to appear since Billy Graham.” Roberts’ attractions were not only his spellbinding sermons, but his “healing line” where hundreds of people came each night to feel the healing touch of Oral Roberts' hand. He now was the most noted healing evangelist since the death of Aimee Semple McPherson in 1943. All of this success came while Roberts was an ordained minister in the Pentecostal Holiness Church.
ROOTS OF THE HEALING MOVEMENT
As a son of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, Oral Roberts received his understanding of divine healing from his parents and his church. Long before the birth of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the doctrine of divine healing had been developed by leaders of the American Holiness Movement who were influenced by such European healing teachers as Presbyterian Edward Irving in London (1830), Lutheran Johann Christoph Blumhardt in Germany (1843), Dorothea Trudel in Switzerland (1851), and Otto Stockmayer in Switzerland (1867). The most influential book coming out of Europe in this period was Stockmayer's Sickness and the Gospel (ND) which pioneered the idea that physical healing for the body was included in the over-all atonement.
American Holiness writers were not far behind in producing a flood of books on healing. These included: William Boardman's 1881 book The Lord that Healeth Thee; Kelso Carter's 1884 book titled The Atonement for Sin and Sickness: or a Full Salvation for Soul and Body; and Adoniram J. Gordon’s The Ministry of Healing. Added to these writers were such healing practitioners as Dr. Charles Cullis of Boston, Massachussetts, and Alexander Dowie of Chicago, Illinois.
By saying that healing for the body was in the atonement, these writers were elevating divine healing into the center of the Gospel mystery. In a way they were placing healing on the same level as salvation for the soul.
Dowie went much further than the others by teaching that true believers should not only pray for healing but that they should not take any medicines or see any doctors but “trust God for their bodies.” To Dowie, doctors were “poisoners general and surgical butchers” and "Doctors, Drugs, and Devils” are “the Foes of Christ the Healer."
When the Pentecostal movement began after 1901, a large proportion of Pentecostals agreed with Dowie and promised God that they would never resort to doctors or medicines but rely only on prayer for healing. The Dowie position was later immortalized in the Black Pentecostal spiritual “Come on in the Room:”
Come on in the room,
Come on in the room;
Jesus is my doctor
and He writes out all of my prescriptions,
He gives me all of my medicine in the room.
HEALING DOCTRINE IN THE PENTECOSTAL HOLINESS CHURCH
The Pentecostal Holiness Church in which Oral Roberts was born and raised was a merger of two holiness churches with roots in the Nineteenth Century Holiness Movement. The first was the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church founded by former primitive Baptist preacher Benjamin Hardin Irwin in 1898 in Anderson, South Carolina. It was an interracial church which offered ordination for women equal to that of men. Irwin became known as a healing evangelist who drew large crowds to his meetings in America and Canada. All the Pentecostal Holiness Churches in Oklahoma began as part of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church.
The other church was the Pentecostal Holiness Church founded in 1900 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, by Abner B. Crumpler, a Methodist evangelist. Both churches became Pentecostal in 1907-08 from direct contacts with Azusa Street and accepted tongues as the “initial evidence” of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. Both churches also were strong advocates of divine healing “as in the atonement.” In 1911, the two churches merged and took the name of the smaller group - “The Pentecostal Holiness Church.”
Both churches included strong doctrinal statements on divine healing in their founding documents. The Constitution of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, first adopted in 1898, contained the following short statement on divine healing:
We believe also in divine healing as in the atonement. (Isa. 53:3-5; Matt. 8:16, 17; Mark 16:14-18; James 5: 14-16; Ex. 15:26).
The Pentecostal Holiness statement was one of the most liberal ones for the times. Although it accepted divine healing as in the atonement it also allowed its members to use doctors and medicines in addition to prayer. In Section I of the Articles of Faith, it read:
The healing of the body of its sickness is a blessed provision of the atonement which is to be appropriated according to James 5:14-15, and other Scriptures. We do not consider it an evidence of sin or a mark or divine displeasure because a person is sick or employs a medical aid. Neither do we believe that it is an evidence in itself that a person is of God because he is healed in answer to prayer.
When the two churches merged in 1911, the language of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church was adopted indicating that the newly-merged church rejected the more liberal view on healing and opened the door for its members to adopt the Dowie view of no doctors or medicines.
THE 1921 SPLIT OVER THE “REMEDY” CONTROVERSY
As time went on, the Dowie position became the accepted view of the church leadership as well as a probable majority of church members. Many took vows of never taking medicines or seeing doctors for themselves or for their families. They would “trust God for their bodies” for life. The popular testimonies of the time were: “Praise God, I am saved, sanctified, filled with the Holy Ghost, and have trusted God for my body for 20 years.” The latter referring to how long they had refused to see doctors or take medicines. One leader, Samuel D. Page reported that he had been “saved and healed” for 27 years.
Inevitably, some passionate believers ran afoul of the law for refusing medical treatment for dying spouses or children. One leader, F. M. Britton, was threatened with arrest in South Carolina for allowing his wife and a son to die in agony after Britton “refused medicine” for them. Some top leaders in the church such as Joseph H. King and George F. Taylor made similar vows and refused to see doctors or take medicines. But there were others who disagreed with the majority view, including Hugh Bowling, Superintendent of the Georgia Conference, and his friend Watson Sorrow, a leading evangelist. In 1919 Bowling published an article in the church paper, The Advocate, stating that “it was no sin at all to take ‘remedies’ and that going to a doctor implied no lack of faith in the patient.”
This led to a firestorm on the pages of The Advocate with hot letters and articles following pro and con on the issue. In defending his position, Bowling wrote in April, 1920 that:
I do not believe those who get sick and use no remedies and drag around for weeks and after so long a time get well are divinely healed, but that nature alone restored them….I do not believe in lying about divine healing. I do not believe that sickness is an evidence of unbelief. I do not believe that healing is paralleled in the atonement.
This was the last straw for Taylor and King. In short order, Bowling and Sorrow were summoned to Franklin Springs to stand trial for their views on divine healing. When they failed to appear for the trial, the two men were expelled from the church, not for preaching false doctrine, but for failure to appear for the trial. But they did not go alone. On January 21, 1921, Bowling and Sorrow took fourteen churches out of the denomination and organized the “Congregational Holiness Church” in the town of High Shoals, Georgia.
As a matter of interest, both King and Taylor changed their minds and at the end of their lives made use of doctors and medicines. In fact, the Pentecostal Holiness Church Manual added a “Doctrinal Emphasis” written by Bishop King in 1945 which, after reaffirming that divine healing was “wrought solely by the application of the atonement to the body,” added the following statement:
Natural means viewed as a product of the law of recovery are not to be despised. Neither are we to look upon their use as sinful on the part of believers in Christ. The healing of Calvary’s stream is the “better way,” and the way to secure complete and permanent healing of all sickness and disease.
Added to this was the doctrinal “Amplification” written by Bishop J.A. Synan in 1961 which presented the same view as King. He stated:
And while we do not condemn the use of medical means in the treatment of physical disease, we do believe in, practice, and commend to our people the laying on of hands by the elders or leaders of the church, the anointing with oil in the name of the Lord, and the offering of prayers for the healing of the sick.
As a postscript to the “remedies controversy” that divided the church in 1921, the original cause of the division was eventually resolved and the Pentecostal Holiness Church admitted that they were on the wrong side of the question. But all attempts to heal the division that produced the Congregational Holiness Church, including apologies, failed to heal the breach between the two denominations which have since gone their separate ways.
Oral Roberts was born in 1918 so the division in his church took place when he was three years old. By the time of his healing in 1935, he felt that the teaching on divine healing had waned somewhat among Pentecostals in the parts of Oklahoma where he lived. So when he began his healing ministry in 1947, Roberts had formed his healing theology from his roots in the Pentecostal Holiness Church. In short, by that time the church still believed that divine healing was provided for in the atonement and that sick persons should first ask for healing prayer with the laying on of hands, but that medicine and doctors could also be used to hasten the healing process. Therefore, healing prayer and medical means were both acceptable to members of the church.
ORAL ROBERTS’ INNOVATIONS
Added to the teachings of his church, Roberts began to read widely and expanded his theological and pastoral horizons. Two secular books that deeply affected his future outlook was Dale Carnegie’s, famous book: How to Win Friends and Influence People, which was recommended by his rich and successful friend Lee Braxton. Another influential and controversial book that influenced Roberts was Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, a secular handbook on how to envision your way to wealth.
Roberts also was influenced by some of the healing evangelists of the middle 1940s. These included, Thomas Wyatt from Portland, Oregon, and William Branham from Jeffersonville, Indiana. There is a famous photo of Oral Roberts standing with Branham and Gordon Lindsay in Kansas City in 1948 at the outset of Roberts’ healing ministry. These evangelists challenged Roberts to launch out as a major healing evangelist.
Roberts soon developed some new approaches to his healing ministry. He continued the laying on of hands as he had been taught, and indeed laid hands on more than one million persons in his healing lines. He also added that he had special healing power in his right hand and that this “point of contact” brought special healing power to the sick persons to whom he ministered. He also erected special prayer tents near the main tent where he could go and pray for people in wheel chairs who could not make it to the healing lines.
Perhaps his most important innovation was bringing his healing services to television audiences in 1954. Now millions of people who might never enter his tent could hear his sermons and witness his healing prayers in their own living rooms. The results were electric. Multiplied millions of Roman Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and others could witness dynamic Pentecostal religion in their own homes. In time, Roberts’ television programs made him the most popular television evangelist of his time.
Another major innovation was the founding of Oral Roberts University in 1965. Roberts had been interested in higher education before the beginning of his healing ministry. In 1946 he had helped his friend R. O. Corvin to found the Southwestern Pentecostal Holiness College in Oklahoma City and briefly served on the faculty. He also raised money for Emmanuel College in Georgia in the late 1940s. The founding mission for Oral Roberts University was summarized in Roberts’ visionary statement that was written on a napkin while dining with Pat Robertson in Norfolk, Virginia in 1960:
"Raise up your students to hear my voice, to go where the light is dim, where my voice is heard small and my healing power is not known, even to the uttermost bounds of the earth. Their work will exceed yours and in this I am well pleased."
After the dedication of ORU in 1967 with Billy Graham as the main speaker, ORU grew to some 5,000 students at its height in the 1970s.
Perhaps Roberts’ most original innovation was the building of the three towered “City of Faith” hospital that was dedicated in 1981. Here he planned to “merge prayer and medicine” in a profound new way. This slogan was exactly the position of the Pentecostal Holiness Church on healing after the “remedies” controversy of the early 1920s. Although the City of Faith was a financial disaster resulting in the closing of the hospital in 1989, the University later converted the towers into office space and maintained the property as an endowment. It was later renamed “CityPlex Towers.”
WHAT ROBERTS RETAINED FROM HIS PENTECOSTAL FORMATION
When he joined the United Methodist Church in 1968, Roberts declared that he would still and always be a PeTo his new pastor, Finis Crutchfield, at the Boston Avenue United Methodist Church and his new Bishop, Angie Smith, Roberts said, “there will be no change in my standard of the Full Gospel message or of my life, my ministry, or of ORU.” He later elaborated, “I was a classical Pentecostal and charismatic before I joined the Methodist Church. I was the same during the nineteen years I was in the Methodist Church….”
Becoming a Methodist was probably the most controversial action of his entire life, causing puzzlement in the press, among liberal Methodists, and among his friends in the Pentecostal Holiness Church. Indeed, his financial support dropped drastically at first as Pentecostals withdrew their support. But in time his new Methodist supporters more than made up the shortfall, especially after Roberts began his prime-time television shows in 1969.
All went well with the Roberts ministry for several years after he joined the Methodist Church, but underneath the surface opposition to Roberts being a Methodist minister began to grow among Methodist leaders who were embarrassed by Roberts’ controversial public image. In 1987, the Tulsa World stated that Roberts was “cast out of the Methodist Church by a special committee of leaders.” After this Roberts organized the “International Charismatic Bible Ministries” (ICBM) organization in 1986 where he could spend his time with his Pentecostal and Charismatic friends until his death in 2009 at 91 years of age.
In 1995 Roberts wrote positively about his upbringing and ministry for almost fifty years in the Pentecostal Holiness Church: “I had become a spoon-fed denominational preacher. I had accepted about 95 percent of everything the denomination taught and did without questioning why or studying the Word of God for myself to ‘see if these things were true.’ I had become an echo, not a ‘voice of one crying in the wilderness.’” He went on to describe what he received from the church on the matter of divine healing which he felt was not being adequately emphasized at that time. He said, “Whether by divine design or by my belonging to that denomination and submitting wholly to it, that calling of taking God’s healing power to my generation became submerged.” He added:
That denomination had a little book called The Discipline, and in it were printed the fundamental doctrines and practices of that church. It included a strong section on the healing of the sick being in the atonement of Christ on the cross. That was a powerful doctrine and statement of purpose. There was, however, no major emphasis on healing as being a practice of the church that I could observe, other than a belief that if you got sick, you were to have faith, and if you could hold out, you were not to go to a doctor…. I do know one thing: I became intensely loyal to believing in the exclusivity of that denomination, although I differed with it on medical science as a viable part of what God has placed on earth for our better health, and the smallness of its vision.
He further went on to say:
I cannot blame the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the denomination I belonged to for the first years of my ministry. The people of that denomination were there long before I was converted and healed and given the call of the healing ministry. They had paid the price to form their own beliefs and denomination and had worked hard for it. In many ways they were a blessing to me. They helped form the patterns of my life in learning the value of being baptized in the Holy Spirit, of living a holy life, of learning loyalty and developing integrity. I made lasting friendships among the people.
Looking back over his life, one can see an amazing simplicity and consistency in Roberts’ life and ministry. Despite his worldwide acclaim, his amazing accomplishments, and his persuasive influence on American religious life, one must agree with his biographer Edwin Harrell who said in his Oral Roberts: An American Life: Oral had not changed. He still believed what Ellis and Claudia had taught him in the little (Pentecostal Holiness) churches of Southeast Oklahoma. He believed in miracles, in visions and anointed prayer cloths. He was still that marveling, faith filled little Oklahoma boy who had clamped his hand on thousands of heads.”
History Interest Group
Vinson Synan
Oral Roberts University
Presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies
It could truly be said that Oral Roberts was a son of the Pentecostal Movement and a father of the Charismatic Movement.
Born in 1918 and raised in the home of Ellis and Claudia Roberts, Pentecostal Holiness ministers, Roberts’ formation was in classical Pentecostalism. The only exception was the seven years after he joined the Methodist Church in Stratford, Oklahoma, and a few months as a teenager when he also joined the Atoka, Oklahoma, Methodist Church along with the entire basketball team. After almost dying from tuberculosis, he was healed in 1935 and returned to the Pentecostal Holiness Church where he flourished as an evangelist and pastor until 1947. In that year he began his healing ministry under huge tents that made him a national figure. By 1954, he went on television and became a household name as millions watched his dynamic sermons and his healing lines. His national television ministry planted the seeds of the Charismatic movement that broke out in all the mainline churches after 1960.
Perhaps the climactic event in his entire life was when Roberts was healed of severe tuberculosis in 1935. The first sign of his illness was when he fell on the floor playing basketball in Atoka, Oklahoma, hemorrhaging blood. He was taken from there to his home in Stratford, Oklahoma, where he lay bedridden coughing up blood and wasting away for 163 days.
During these days he was finally converted due to the passionate prayers of his father and mother. Before this, despite the prayers of his father, Oral had left home and lived a dissolute life in high school before falling ill. All of this changed when Elmer Roberts, Oral’s older brother, took him to a tent meeting in nearby Ada, Oklahoma, where a Church of God of Prophecy evangelist, George W. Moncey, was holding a healing crusade. For the first time, Oral saw a healing line where Moncey’s hands were laid on over 200 persons. After the prayer line ended, Moncey came to where Oral was sitting and said the unforgettable words: “O Lord heal this boy”…. and then he said, “You foul tormenting disease, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, come out of this boy. Loose him and let him go free.”
Immediately Oral said that:
“I felt the power of the Lord. It was like your hand striking me, like electricity going through me. It went into my lungs, went into my tongue, and all at once I could breathe. I could breathe all the way down. Before that when I tried to breathe all the way down I would hemorrhage.”
This was the great turning point in Oral Roberts’ life which would soon lead him into the Pentecostal Holiness ministry as pastor and evangelist and later into a worldwide healing ministry that would change the face of Christianity in the twentieth century.
RED LETTER DAYS
It was a red-letter day for the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in the life of Oral Roberts when the dedication of the gleaming new Oral Roberts University took place on April 2, 1967. Over 18,000 friends came to hear Billy Graham dedicate the University while Oral’s Bishop from the Pentecostal Holiness Church, Joseph A. Synan, read the Scriptures. The presence of these two men on the platform spoke volumes about Roberts’ recent rise from the Pentecostal subculture in Oklahoma to become a world renowned religious leader with millions of followers. After being lionized at Billy Graham’s Berlin Congress for evangelists in 1966, Roberts invited the famous Graham to dedicate his University.
Another red-letter day occurred on November 1, 1981, when Roberts dedicated his City of Faith hospital before a crowd of 13,000 followers who gathered in the nearby Mabee Center due to torrential rains outside. Instead of Billy Graham, Roberts’ Charismatic friends filled the platform including such luminaries as Demos Shakarian, Pat Robertson, and Oklahoma Governor George Nigh, who assisted in the dedication. Also on the platform was the Methodist educator, Dr. Jimmy Buskirk, who Oral Roberts tapped to head the new ORU School of Theology after joining the Methodist Church in 1968.
These two events highlighted the two major periods in Oral Roberts’ life; his ministry as a Pentecostal Holiness evangelist and pastor, and his life as a Methodist leader in the burgeoning charismatic movement. Indeed, after becoming a well-known healing evangelist, Roberts claimed that his ministry began in 1947 when he held his first healing crusade in his hometown of Enid, Oklahoma. But as a matter of fact, Roberts’ ministry began on the very night he was healed of tuberculosis in 1935. After the healing prayer by George Moncey, Roberts sprang to his feet, ran across the platform and exclaimed “Í’m healed. I’m healed” and preached his first sermon. He later said that the Lord spoke to him that very night saying, “Son, I am going to heal you and you are going to take my healing power to your generation. You must build me a university and build it on my authority and the Holy Spirit.”
ORAL ROBERTS AND THE PENTECOSTAL HOLINESS CHURCH
After he regained his strength, Roberts joined his father in preaching local revivals where his audiences were amazed at his eloquence although he had stuttered badly since childhood. After this, Oral went on to be licensed to preach in 1936 and ordained to the Pentecostal Holiness ministry in 1937. In a few short years, Roberts gained attention as an effective evangelist preaching all over the nation and in faraway Canada. His meetings attracted overflow crowds with many hundreds converted.
He also published two books that helped to put him on the denominational map. They were Salvation by the Blood in 1938, and the Drama of the End-Times in 1941, both published by the Pentecostal Holiness Church. In addition to this, he was elected to represent his East Oklahoma Conference in the denomination’s General Conferences in Franklin Springs, Georgia, 1941 and in Oklahoma City in 1945. All this marked young Roberts as a young rising star in the Pentecostal Holiness Church.
During these years, although Roberts regularly testified to his healing experience in 1935, he seemed to be more interested in evangelism and prophecy than in divine healing. His sermons bristled with expositions and defenses of the five “cardinal doctrines” taught by the Pentecostal Holiness Church, i.e. salvation, sanctification, baptism in the Holy Spirit with the initial evidence of speaking in tongues, divine healing as in the atonement, and the imminent second coming of Christ. He also became a master of the dynamic Pentecostal style of preaching. Two of his models were Joseph Synan, his Bishop, and G. H. Montgomery, Editor of the Pentecostal Holiness Advocate, both of whom honed their skills in camp meetings and revivals in local churches. At this point Roberts was clearly a creature of his denomination.
For six years, from 1941 to 1947, Roberts pastored Pentecostal Holiness congregations in Shawnee, and Enid in Oklahoma as well as in Toccoa, Georgia, and Fuqua Springs-Varina in North Carolina. He was successful and dissatisfied at the same time as a local pastor. All the churches grew under his leadership and his pay rose to one of the highest levels in the church. It was in the parsonage of the Enid Pentecostal Holiness Church that Roberts received his definite call to the healing ministry in 1947. He said that he heard the Lord say, “Son, don’t be like other men, don’t be like any other denomination. Be like Jesus, and heal the people as he did.” It was also in Enid that he held his first healing service which eventually launched him into becoming one of the most popular evangelists in the history of the United States.
In 1947 Oral Roberts published his third book, If You Need Healing – Do These Things and the next year began publication of his monthly magazine Healing Waters. At the same time he purchased his first “Tent Cathedral” which seated some 3,000 persons. He later bought a much larger tent that seated 12,500. In May 1951, Roberts was featured along with Billy Graham in Life magazine as “the loudest and splashiest revivalist to appear since Billy Graham.” Roberts’ attractions were not only his spellbinding sermons, but his “healing line” where hundreds of people came each night to feel the healing touch of Oral Roberts' hand. He now was the most noted healing evangelist since the death of Aimee Semple McPherson in 1943. All of this success came while Roberts was an ordained minister in the Pentecostal Holiness Church.
ROOTS OF THE HEALING MOVEMENT
As a son of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, Oral Roberts received his understanding of divine healing from his parents and his church. Long before the birth of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the doctrine of divine healing had been developed by leaders of the American Holiness Movement who were influenced by such European healing teachers as Presbyterian Edward Irving in London (1830), Lutheran Johann Christoph Blumhardt in Germany (1843), Dorothea Trudel in Switzerland (1851), and Otto Stockmayer in Switzerland (1867). The most influential book coming out of Europe in this period was Stockmayer's Sickness and the Gospel (ND) which pioneered the idea that physical healing for the body was included in the over-all atonement.
American Holiness writers were not far behind in producing a flood of books on healing. These included: William Boardman's 1881 book The Lord that Healeth Thee; Kelso Carter's 1884 book titled The Atonement for Sin and Sickness: or a Full Salvation for Soul and Body; and Adoniram J. Gordon’s The Ministry of Healing. Added to these writers were such healing practitioners as Dr. Charles Cullis of Boston, Massachussetts, and Alexander Dowie of Chicago, Illinois.
By saying that healing for the body was in the atonement, these writers were elevating divine healing into the center of the Gospel mystery. In a way they were placing healing on the same level as salvation for the soul.
Dowie went much further than the others by teaching that true believers should not only pray for healing but that they should not take any medicines or see any doctors but “trust God for their bodies.” To Dowie, doctors were “poisoners general and surgical butchers” and "Doctors, Drugs, and Devils” are “the Foes of Christ the Healer."
When the Pentecostal movement began after 1901, a large proportion of Pentecostals agreed with Dowie and promised God that they would never resort to doctors or medicines but rely only on prayer for healing. The Dowie position was later immortalized in the Black Pentecostal spiritual “Come on in the Room:”
Come on in the room,
Come on in the room;
Jesus is my doctor
and He writes out all of my prescriptions,
He gives me all of my medicine in the room.
HEALING DOCTRINE IN THE PENTECOSTAL HOLINESS CHURCH
The Pentecostal Holiness Church in which Oral Roberts was born and raised was a merger of two holiness churches with roots in the Nineteenth Century Holiness Movement. The first was the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church founded by former primitive Baptist preacher Benjamin Hardin Irwin in 1898 in Anderson, South Carolina. It was an interracial church which offered ordination for women equal to that of men. Irwin became known as a healing evangelist who drew large crowds to his meetings in America and Canada. All the Pentecostal Holiness Churches in Oklahoma began as part of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church.
The other church was the Pentecostal Holiness Church founded in 1900 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, by Abner B. Crumpler, a Methodist evangelist. Both churches became Pentecostal in 1907-08 from direct contacts with Azusa Street and accepted tongues as the “initial evidence” of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. Both churches also were strong advocates of divine healing “as in the atonement.” In 1911, the two churches merged and took the name of the smaller group - “The Pentecostal Holiness Church.”
Both churches included strong doctrinal statements on divine healing in their founding documents. The Constitution of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, first adopted in 1898, contained the following short statement on divine healing:
We believe also in divine healing as in the atonement. (Isa. 53:3-5; Matt. 8:16, 17; Mark 16:14-18; James 5: 14-16; Ex. 15:26).
The Pentecostal Holiness statement was one of the most liberal ones for the times. Although it accepted divine healing as in the atonement it also allowed its members to use doctors and medicines in addition to prayer. In Section I of the Articles of Faith, it read:
The healing of the body of its sickness is a blessed provision of the atonement which is to be appropriated according to James 5:14-15, and other Scriptures. We do not consider it an evidence of sin or a mark or divine displeasure because a person is sick or employs a medical aid. Neither do we believe that it is an evidence in itself that a person is of God because he is healed in answer to prayer.
When the two churches merged in 1911, the language of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church was adopted indicating that the newly-merged church rejected the more liberal view on healing and opened the door for its members to adopt the Dowie view of no doctors or medicines.
THE 1921 SPLIT OVER THE “REMEDY” CONTROVERSY
As time went on, the Dowie position became the accepted view of the church leadership as well as a probable majority of church members. Many took vows of never taking medicines or seeing doctors for themselves or for their families. They would “trust God for their bodies” for life. The popular testimonies of the time were: “Praise God, I am saved, sanctified, filled with the Holy Ghost, and have trusted God for my body for 20 years.” The latter referring to how long they had refused to see doctors or take medicines. One leader, Samuel D. Page reported that he had been “saved and healed” for 27 years.
Inevitably, some passionate believers ran afoul of the law for refusing medical treatment for dying spouses or children. One leader, F. M. Britton, was threatened with arrest in South Carolina for allowing his wife and a son to die in agony after Britton “refused medicine” for them. Some top leaders in the church such as Joseph H. King and George F. Taylor made similar vows and refused to see doctors or take medicines. But there were others who disagreed with the majority view, including Hugh Bowling, Superintendent of the Georgia Conference, and his friend Watson Sorrow, a leading evangelist. In 1919 Bowling published an article in the church paper, The Advocate, stating that “it was no sin at all to take ‘remedies’ and that going to a doctor implied no lack of faith in the patient.”
This led to a firestorm on the pages of The Advocate with hot letters and articles following pro and con on the issue. In defending his position, Bowling wrote in April, 1920 that:
I do not believe those who get sick and use no remedies and drag around for weeks and after so long a time get well are divinely healed, but that nature alone restored them….I do not believe in lying about divine healing. I do not believe that sickness is an evidence of unbelief. I do not believe that healing is paralleled in the atonement.
This was the last straw for Taylor and King. In short order, Bowling and Sorrow were summoned to Franklin Springs to stand trial for their views on divine healing. When they failed to appear for the trial, the two men were expelled from the church, not for preaching false doctrine, but for failure to appear for the trial. But they did not go alone. On January 21, 1921, Bowling and Sorrow took fourteen churches out of the denomination and organized the “Congregational Holiness Church” in the town of High Shoals, Georgia.
As a matter of interest, both King and Taylor changed their minds and at the end of their lives made use of doctors and medicines. In fact, the Pentecostal Holiness Church Manual added a “Doctrinal Emphasis” written by Bishop King in 1945 which, after reaffirming that divine healing was “wrought solely by the application of the atonement to the body,” added the following statement:
Natural means viewed as a product of the law of recovery are not to be despised. Neither are we to look upon their use as sinful on the part of believers in Christ. The healing of Calvary’s stream is the “better way,” and the way to secure complete and permanent healing of all sickness and disease.
Added to this was the doctrinal “Amplification” written by Bishop J.A. Synan in 1961 which presented the same view as King. He stated:
And while we do not condemn the use of medical means in the treatment of physical disease, we do believe in, practice, and commend to our people the laying on of hands by the elders or leaders of the church, the anointing with oil in the name of the Lord, and the offering of prayers for the healing of the sick.
As a postscript to the “remedies controversy” that divided the church in 1921, the original cause of the division was eventually resolved and the Pentecostal Holiness Church admitted that they were on the wrong side of the question. But all attempts to heal the division that produced the Congregational Holiness Church, including apologies, failed to heal the breach between the two denominations which have since gone their separate ways.
Oral Roberts was born in 1918 so the division in his church took place when he was three years old. By the time of his healing in 1935, he felt that the teaching on divine healing had waned somewhat among Pentecostals in the parts of Oklahoma where he lived. So when he began his healing ministry in 1947, Roberts had formed his healing theology from his roots in the Pentecostal Holiness Church. In short, by that time the church still believed that divine healing was provided for in the atonement and that sick persons should first ask for healing prayer with the laying on of hands, but that medicine and doctors could also be used to hasten the healing process. Therefore, healing prayer and medical means were both acceptable to members of the church.
ORAL ROBERTS’ INNOVATIONS
Added to the teachings of his church, Roberts began to read widely and expanded his theological and pastoral horizons. Two secular books that deeply affected his future outlook was Dale Carnegie’s, famous book: How to Win Friends and Influence People, which was recommended by his rich and successful friend Lee Braxton. Another influential and controversial book that influenced Roberts was Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, a secular handbook on how to envision your way to wealth.
Roberts also was influenced by some of the healing evangelists of the middle 1940s. These included, Thomas Wyatt from Portland, Oregon, and William Branham from Jeffersonville, Indiana. There is a famous photo of Oral Roberts standing with Branham and Gordon Lindsay in Kansas City in 1948 at the outset of Roberts’ healing ministry. These evangelists challenged Roberts to launch out as a major healing evangelist.
Roberts soon developed some new approaches to his healing ministry. He continued the laying on of hands as he had been taught, and indeed laid hands on more than one million persons in his healing lines. He also added that he had special healing power in his right hand and that this “point of contact” brought special healing power to the sick persons to whom he ministered. He also erected special prayer tents near the main tent where he could go and pray for people in wheel chairs who could not make it to the healing lines.
Perhaps his most important innovation was bringing his healing services to television audiences in 1954. Now millions of people who might never enter his tent could hear his sermons and witness his healing prayers in their own living rooms. The results were electric. Multiplied millions of Roman Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and others could witness dynamic Pentecostal religion in their own homes. In time, Roberts’ television programs made him the most popular television evangelist of his time.
Another major innovation was the founding of Oral Roberts University in 1965. Roberts had been interested in higher education before the beginning of his healing ministry. In 1946 he had helped his friend R. O. Corvin to found the Southwestern Pentecostal Holiness College in Oklahoma City and briefly served on the faculty. He also raised money for Emmanuel College in Georgia in the late 1940s. The founding mission for Oral Roberts University was summarized in Roberts’ visionary statement that was written on a napkin while dining with Pat Robertson in Norfolk, Virginia in 1960:
"Raise up your students to hear my voice, to go where the light is dim, where my voice is heard small and my healing power is not known, even to the uttermost bounds of the earth. Their work will exceed yours and in this I am well pleased."
After the dedication of ORU in 1967 with Billy Graham as the main speaker, ORU grew to some 5,000 students at its height in the 1970s.
Perhaps Roberts’ most original innovation was the building of the three towered “City of Faith” hospital that was dedicated in 1981. Here he planned to “merge prayer and medicine” in a profound new way. This slogan was exactly the position of the Pentecostal Holiness Church on healing after the “remedies” controversy of the early 1920s. Although the City of Faith was a financial disaster resulting in the closing of the hospital in 1989, the University later converted the towers into office space and maintained the property as an endowment. It was later renamed “CityPlex Towers.”
WHAT ROBERTS RETAINED FROM HIS PENTECOSTAL FORMATION
When he joined the United Methodist Church in 1968, Roberts declared that he would still and always be a PeTo his new pastor, Finis Crutchfield, at the Boston Avenue United Methodist Church and his new Bishop, Angie Smith, Roberts said, “there will be no change in my standard of the Full Gospel message or of my life, my ministry, or of ORU.” He later elaborated, “I was a classical Pentecostal and charismatic before I joined the Methodist Church. I was the same during the nineteen years I was in the Methodist Church….”
Becoming a Methodist was probably the most controversial action of his entire life, causing puzzlement in the press, among liberal Methodists, and among his friends in the Pentecostal Holiness Church. Indeed, his financial support dropped drastically at first as Pentecostals withdrew their support. But in time his new Methodist supporters more than made up the shortfall, especially after Roberts began his prime-time television shows in 1969.
All went well with the Roberts ministry for several years after he joined the Methodist Church, but underneath the surface opposition to Roberts being a Methodist minister began to grow among Methodist leaders who were embarrassed by Roberts’ controversial public image. In 1987, the Tulsa World stated that Roberts was “cast out of the Methodist Church by a special committee of leaders.” After this Roberts organized the “International Charismatic Bible Ministries” (ICBM) organization in 1986 where he could spend his time with his Pentecostal and Charismatic friends until his death in 2009 at 91 years of age.
In 1995 Roberts wrote positively about his upbringing and ministry for almost fifty years in the Pentecostal Holiness Church: “I had become a spoon-fed denominational preacher. I had accepted about 95 percent of everything the denomination taught and did without questioning why or studying the Word of God for myself to ‘see if these things were true.’ I had become an echo, not a ‘voice of one crying in the wilderness.’” He went on to describe what he received from the church on the matter of divine healing which he felt was not being adequately emphasized at that time. He said, “Whether by divine design or by my belonging to that denomination and submitting wholly to it, that calling of taking God’s healing power to my generation became submerged.” He added:
That denomination had a little book called The Discipline, and in it were printed the fundamental doctrines and practices of that church. It included a strong section on the healing of the sick being in the atonement of Christ on the cross. That was a powerful doctrine and statement of purpose. There was, however, no major emphasis on healing as being a practice of the church that I could observe, other than a belief that if you got sick, you were to have faith, and if you could hold out, you were not to go to a doctor…. I do know one thing: I became intensely loyal to believing in the exclusivity of that denomination, although I differed with it on medical science as a viable part of what God has placed on earth for our better health, and the smallness of its vision.
He further went on to say:
I cannot blame the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the denomination I belonged to for the first years of my ministry. The people of that denomination were there long before I was converted and healed and given the call of the healing ministry. They had paid the price to form their own beliefs and denomination and had worked hard for it. In many ways they were a blessing to me. They helped form the patterns of my life in learning the value of being baptized in the Holy Spirit, of living a holy life, of learning loyalty and developing integrity. I made lasting friendships among the people.
Looking back over his life, one can see an amazing simplicity and consistency in Roberts’ life and ministry. Despite his worldwide acclaim, his amazing accomplishments, and his persuasive influence on American religious life, one must agree with his biographer Edwin Harrell who said in his Oral Roberts: An American Life: Oral had not changed. He still believed what Ellis and Claudia had taught him in the little (Pentecostal Holiness) churches of Southeast Oklahoma. He believed in miracles, in visions and anointed prayer cloths. He was still that marveling, faith filled little Oklahoma boy who had clamped his hand on thousands of heads.”