Friday, December 15, 2023

It is the 15th of December, 2023. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

 

It was an early staple of this program: the Dr. Gene Scott All-Stars. These were characters- mostly modern American Christian “personalities” who ranged from “eccentric” to “problematic.” Some characters- many of them television preachers- are too heterodox (see Benny Hinn), but there are a few who live right on the edge and are historically significant. This podcast has never been “here’s why so-and-so is wrong” but rather an introduction to the names and stories with historical significance. Where I was born earlier, I would probably find myself at a rally held by Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, but her fingerprints on the history of American Christianity are significant.  

All this is a prologue to the story of one of America’s biggest names in television, radio, and Christian higher education- he was Granville Oral Roberts, born near Ada, Oklahoma, in 1918.  

He was the son of an itinerant Pentecostal minister and would follow in his father's footsteps after claiming to have been healed by another traveling minister of both his stutter and tuberculosis. He would be ordained in the Pentecostal Holiness Church and serve churches in Oklahoma until 1947. In that year, he began his own healing and revival campaign and the magazine “Healing Waters” (later renamed Abundant Life Magazine).

In 1951, he came to Los Angeles for a revival tour and became a member of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International- a group designed to make Pentecostalism mainstream (it had been seen as sawdust and backwoods by many). By 1955, he had begun his popular television program and, according to Roberts, was given the vision to build Oral Roberts University in 1960. In 1966, he was invited by Billy Graham to be a part of the panel for Christianity Today at the Berlin Congress on World Evangelism.

There, he took criticism for being too dependent on signs and wonders and dedicated himself to moving into the evangelical mainline. In 1968, he shocked many of his followers by leaving the Pentecostal Holiness Church for the United Methodist Church in the Protestant Mainline. His television program went from a service of healing to a kind of Christian variety-hour program.

While he was embraced by Graham and many evangelicals, his “seed of faith” theology mirrored many in the “word of faith” movement, and his claims to have direct revelation from God kept him on the fringes and with a foot in the world of some of the more flamboyant television preachers- although free of some of the extreme personal failings that plagued that group in the 80s and 90s.

Growing up poor, he seems to have been seduced by wealth- his ministry struggled to keep up both his ambitious programs and standard of life. After building the City of Faith Medical and Research Center in 1981, he claimed he needed 8 million for his ministry or “God would call him home.” The last bit of that money was raised by a donation from the owner of a Florida dog track owner who feared Roberts was threatening to take his own life.

His life was not without tragedy; his daughter died in an airplane crash, and one of his sons committed suicide after coming out. His son Richard would take over the University, but the scandal led him to step down and for Oral to return temporarily.

Historian Grant Wacker wrote of Roberts:

“Other than Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr., and maybe Jerry Falwell, it would be hard to name a different religious leader of more importance…In the middle of the 20th century, he took faith healing and Pentecostalism away from a frowzy backwoods image and gave it an upbeat face.”

Historian and one-time faculty member at Oral Roberts University, Ted Olsen, wrote of Roberts:

“One thing I could not question was his sincerity. At times, he seemed emotionally unstable and suffering delusions of grandeur, but his passion for God's goodness and power was beyond doubt or question.”

He was at the center of the charismatic renewal in 20th-century evangelicalism, and his university is one of the largest of its kind- accredited and with a substantial endowment.

In a review for one of the only historical monographs on Roberts, John Boles wrote: “He has seemed too rough-edged,  too old-fashioned,  too flamboyant and even fraudulent for academic scholars to deem worthy of a  careful,  judicious biography. He  has  been  a  revivalist  to debunk  and  rebuke,  not  to  understand.”

Roberts would retire in Newport Beach, California, and died on the 15th of December in 2009. Born in 1918, Granville Oral Roberts was 91 years old.

 

The last word for today comes from the daily lectionary from Psalm 126- a Psalm of Ascents:

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
    we were like those who dreamed.

Our mouths were filled with laughter,

    our tongues with songs of joy.


Then it was said among the nations,

    “The Lord has done great things for them.”

The Lord has done great things for us,

    and we are filled with joy.

Restore our fortunes, Lord,

    like streams in the Negev.

Those who sow with tears

    will reap with songs of joy.

Those who go out weeping,

    carrying seed to sow,


will return with songs of joy,

    carrying sheaves with them.

  

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 15th of December 2023, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. 

The show is produced by a man also once accused of being “too rough-edged,  too old-fashioned,  too flamboyant” he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who couldn’t find anything on his son, “B,” and my favorite line of toothbrush- I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.