A Losing Proposition

As with most evangelical projects, the Roberts empire is in perpetual crisis in spite of the millions that are poured into it annually by the faithful. Half-way through, construction suddenly halted on Roberts’s $14-million Healing Center. This part of Roberts’s operation had been built over the objections of everyone except God. Tulsa was already oversupplied with hospital beds, and all those who foresaw disaster for this addition were ignored until it became obvious that economics was winning out over prayer. In an attempt to save the project, Roberts pleaded to viewers of a November 1985 Sunday morning TV show: “The City of Faith now is at the point it could be lost ... I’m calling you to Tulsa.” This was an attempt to fill the beds with paying customers, but it turned out that many of those who responded to the appeal were on health plans that did not encourage long, costly hospital stays at their expense. Also, about 60 percent of the flock from which Roberts draws both patients and donors is older than 65. As these “prayer partners” (contributors) undergo reductions in income or die off, they cease to support the Roberts machine, and Oral has not tried to, or has been unable to, attract a younger group of followers who would not be so likely to suffer these changes. The hospital, which was originally designed for 777 beds (Oral has a fixation on magic numbers) and was finally licensed for only 294 when it opened in 1981, has since averaged just 125 patients. It cannot support itself, and Roberts has had to take a massive amount of money from other branches of his organization to put into the project to save it from going under. Much of this rescue money came from a university quasi-endowment fund accumulated in previous years when the ministry was raking in money at a much greater rate. In 1981, for example, more than $75 million came in for the university; that figure had dwindled to $20 million in 1982, and to $17 million in 1983.

Divine Financial Advice

Roberts has always claimed to obtain his instructions directly from God, and it began to appear, even to believers, that the evangelist needed a better financial adviser. But he chose to blame his problems on another entity. He declared: “The Devil is coming against me and this ministry in a way that is almost beyond belief.” In other words, neither his own poor judgment nor God’s had anything to do with it. Financial experts advised Roberts that he could easily borrow on the land and capital improvements that he has in Tulsa to save the hospital. He declined to do so, saying that he would never borrow on those assets. But he failed to mention that the hospital was already in debt to the U.S. government for huge loans taken to get the operation under way. Who approved those loans—and why, in view of the infeasibility of the project—may never be known, along with so many other undiscoverable facts about Roberts. The original God-given theory was that income from the hospital and clinic would support the university. Exactly the opposite took place. To quote former ORU official William Brunk, “Instead of becoming a blessing to the university, [the hospital] simply dissipated what was there.” Roberts’s financial adventure can only be described as disastrous. Oral’s powers of rationalization have seldom been equaled, in or out of the evangelical business. To excuse his dipping into the endowment fund, he observed that every university that has received and maintained big endowments has eventually departed from the faith. Thus, according to his reasoning, ORU was obviously better off without that fund. In the mid-1980s, as Roberts’s tearful pleadings for money were aired—and were largely unheeded by an audience weary of such constant begging—employees began leaving the organization, and others were simply pared from the payroll in order to try to save the entire operation from going under. According to a published statement from Roberts, those who were not interested in supporting him and ORU by either voluntarily resigning or contributing $1,000 apiece to help him out were “of the Devil.” This reflects his callous behavior toward employees and those close to him. “You simply don’t get in his way,” say executives, who claim that he has often betrayed them and caused them to lose prestige among those with whom they do business, because of broken promises and misinformation that he has given them. Such autocratic behavior is hardly surprising in a man who believes that God guides his every move. In his mind, what Oral decides is what God has decided. Shortly before the exciting conclusion of what the press came to refer to as the “Roberts deathwatch” early in 1987, Oral had appeared at a Conference on World Evangelism to explain himself. He had already tried to explain how he knows that God speaks directly to him, a claim he often made to his followers. In the April 1983 issue of his publication Abundant Life, he had said:It’s something I’d stake my eternal soul upon—that I saw what I saw, that I have heard what I have heard, that I know that I know that I know.

So there! On March 2, 1987, Oral told possibly alarmed donors:As you know, the news media have questioned our motives and mocked and held us up to ridicule for weeks now. They’ve gone so far as to suggest our program be canceled on television. Also, certain religious leaders have mocked me for saying GOD STILL SPEAKS TODAY—and have jumped on me for saying God spoke to Oral Roberts.

For the folks at the conference, he was a little more specific on that point. He set forth a scenario in which he explained that everything Jesus ever said wasn’t necessarily written down in the Bible (one can imagine such omitted comments as “Isn’t Jerusalem dull on a weeknight?” and “If these crowds don’t stop touching my garment, I’ll smite someone!”), and that therefore Roberts was able to tune in to God and company and supply a lot of unwritten holy words. Thus, what he reported God had told him would not necessarily be found already written in the scriptures.