Beware of Oral Roberts
By Bro. David Cloud
March 31, 2006 - David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143. Send e-mail: fbns@wayoflife.org
Pentecostal evangelist Oral Roberts was hospitalized on March 23 after he broke his hip from a fall in his home. Roberts is one of the pioneers of the “faith healing” movement. In the 1950s he conducted healing crusades in a tent that seated 12,500 while hundreds of thousands more watched on television. Oral Roberts University, established in 1965, has a student body of 5,000. Multiplied millions of copies of his books have been sold, and he has influenced an entire generation of Pentecostal evangelists.
The strange thing about the recent hospitalization is that Roberts teaches that sickness is not God's will. In his Abundant Life magazine in 1976 he said: “I KNOW IT IS GOD'S HIGHEST WISH FOR YOU TO BE IN HEALTH. ... SICKNESS IS NOT PART OF GOD'S PLAN AND NOT DEVISED BY GOD'S WILL” (Roberts, “Why I know that God wants to heal you,” Abundant Life, Sept. 1976). During the heyday of his healing crusades, Roberts claimed to be able to discern the “demons of illness” through his right hand, claiming that the power of God flowed like a current of electricity and even felt like “liquid fire” at times. Yet Roberts' healing ministry has been examined by faithful men of God and has been proven bogus.
Pastor Carroll Stegall, pastor of Pryor Street Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, attended a number of Roberts' healing crusades and did follow-up with those who had claimed healings. He concluded: “I have never seen a vestige of change. ... Far from blessing, their arrival in a city is rather a curse, a misery, a racket, a destruction of faith in simple people” (Stegall, Modern Tongues and Healing Movement). In 1950, during a healing crusade in Amarillo, Texas, about fifty people were hospitalized after the tent ripped apart. In 1951 a businessman died during a crusade in Atlanta. In 1955 Jonas Rider died during a crusade in Calgary, and in 1956 Mary Vondersher died only 12 hours after appearing on Roberts' television program and testifying that she was healed. In 1959 a man died during a Oral Roberts crusade in Oakland, California, and two others died during a crusade in Fayetteville, North Carolina. In 1984, Oral's 10th grandchild died two days after birth in spite of the flurry of prayers of faith that were sent up by a slew of Word-Faith believers and that were based on the “healing in the atonement” theology (Harrell, Oral Roberts: An American Life, pp. 343-347). In October 1992 and again in February 1999 Oral was hospitalized with heart attacks. The one in 1992 occurred only hours after Paul Crouch “healed” Oral of chest pains on a TBN Broadcast (Christianity in Crisis, pp. 237-238).
Please understand that we are not gloating over these tragedies. These are very sad events and there is no joy in relating them. The reason we report these things is that Oral Roberts and other Pentecostals and Charismatics claim that physical healing is guaranteed in the atonement and the apostolic sign gifts are operative today. These claims must be taken seriously. If physical healing in this life is guaranteed by faith, if special healing gifts belong to Christians today, if the apostolic sign gifts are operative, and if God wills that Christians be healthy and prosperous, it will be evident. These facts from the Pentecostal movement demonstrate that their claims are not true. They have the same problems, the same sicknesses, the same afflictions, the same financial difficulties, as Christians who do not believe in such doctrine.
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