Word: oral
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though himself a college dropout, he is president of Oral Roberts University, a $30 million. 500-acre campus in Tulsa, Okla., which in only six years of existence has won full accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. Though for two decades he conducted his crusades as a minister of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, Roberts was accepted as a United Methodist minister in 1968. This week he will be one of the guest speakers at a Catskill Mountain retreat for Methodist clergymen from New York...
...also become a pillar of the Tulsa community. He is a director of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and of one of the city's largest banks. He belongs to Rotary. His operations are vast. Besides supporting the 1,400-student university, the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association publishes a monthly magazine called Abundant Life (circ. 1,200,000) and a quarterly inspirational guide called Daily Blessing (circ. 400,000), plans his television shows, and promotes his radio program to 165 stations. All together, the Roberts empire generates more mail than any other Tulsa concern, including Shell...
Good Manners. Some of the contributions doubtless come from new, affluent friends who have found Oral Roberts University a source of civic pride and a haven of good academic manners (boys in ties, girls in skirts, no smoking anywhere). But most of the support probably still comes from the millions who read the magazines, follow Roberts on radio or television, and send for free gifts. A typical gift last Christmas was a replica of a Judean oil lamp (with a candle in it); this Easter there will be a plate emblazoned with "He is not here. He is risen." Recipients...
...least 800,000 of the most loyal supporters have become permanent "prayer partners" and receive monthly prayer letters from Oral. "Are you suffering?" asked a recent one. "Is pain raging through your body? Is your marriage falling apart? Does it seem that no one cares? I want to help you get the answer you need. I want to pray with you." Each day, whether in Tulsa or traveling, Roberts gets a thick, typed list of the names and needs of all those who write with requests. He sometimes prays for them spectacularly-from a 200-ft. Prayer Tower that rises...
...this month is Roberts' 47th book, an autobiography entitled The Call, which has already sold 30,000 copies. Disarmingly folksy, the book takes Oral upward from his grim days as a preacher's son ("I felt quite sure that Jesus lived with us because Mamma and Papa talked to him so much"), on a Pilgrim's Progress as it might have been rewritten by Horatio Alger. All the hagiographic basics are there: his mother's vow to give her child to God in return for the healing of a neighbor's child; his bloody bout...