(RNS1-MARCH27) Faith healer Oral Roberts at the May 2005 funeral of his wife, Evelyn
Roberts. See RNS-DIGEST-MARCH27, transmitted March 27, 2006. Religion News Service
photo courtesy of Tulsa (Okla.) World.

(RNS1-MARCH27) Faith healer Oral Roberts at the May 2005 funeral of his wife, Evelyn
Roberts. See RNS-DIGEST-MARCH27, transmitted March 27, 2006. Religion News Service
photo courtesy of Tulsa (Okla.) World.

(RNS1-MARCH27) Faith healer Oral Roberts at the May 2005 funeral of his wife, Evelyn
Roberts. See RNS-DIGEST-MARCH27, transmitted March 27, 2006. Religion News Service
photo courtesy of Tulsa (Okla.) World.

(RNS1-MARCH27) Faith healer Oral Roberts at the May 2005 funeral of his wife, Evelyn
Roberts. See RNS-DIGEST-MARCH27, transmitted March 27, 2006. Religion News Service
photo courtesy of Tulsa (Okla.) World.

(RNS1-MARCH27) Faith healer Oral Roberts at the May 2005 funeral of his wife, Evelyn
Roberts. See RNS-DIGEST-MARCH27, transmitted March 27, 2006. Religion News Service
photo courtesy of Tulsa (Okla.) World.

(RNS1-MARCH27) Faith healer Oral Roberts at the May 2005 funeral of his wife, Evelyn
Roberts. See RNS-DIGEST-MARCH27, transmitted March 27, 2006. Religion News Service
photo courtesy of Tulsa (Okla.) World.

(RNS1-MARCH27) Faith healer Oral Roberts at the May 2005 funeral of his wife, Evelyn
Roberts. See RNS-DIGEST-MARCH27, transmitted March 27, 2006. Religion News Service
photo courtesy of Tulsa (Okla.) World.

(RNS) Oral Roberts, the pioneering TV evangelist and faith healer who became the dean of America’s Pentecostal preachers, died Tuesday (Dec. 15) at the age of 91.

He died in Newport Beach, Calif., of complications from pneumonia, his publicist announced.

One of the nation’s first television evangelists, as well as the founder of the Tulsa-based Oral Roberts University, Roberts was the author of more than 130 books, including his massive autobiography, “Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry.”

To millions, Roberts’ name was synonymous with faith healer. But it was a term Roberts himself disliked; though he once claimed to have healed 1.5 million people, he preferred to emphasize a concept of “seed faith” — the belief that something given in good faith, whether prayer or money, would be returned exponentially in the form of personal happiness.

“If God had not … raised up the ministry of Oral Roberts, the entire charismatic movement might not have occurred,” said the Rev. Jack Hayford, former president of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, in a statement.

Ordained by the Pentecostal Holiness Church — he joined the United Methodist Church in 1968 and left after 19 years — Roberts drew nationwide attention during his 60-plus-year career for his healing services and “discussions” with God.

Ever since Roberts came to Oklahoma’s second largest city six decades ago and established what would become a $500 million empire that included an ornate, 200-foot-tall prayer tower, he became a source of admiration to many locals who saw his university especially as a valuable economic addition to the city.

But to Roberts’ critics, he was an Elmer Gantry-like preacher who manipulated the emotions of his audience for financial gain through claims of repeated personal visits from God. Among Roberts’ famous gaffes was his 1986 appeal to his television audience to contribute $8 million to a medical missionary program or God “would call me home,” as well as his claim that Jesus appeared to him as a 900-foot-tall person.

But Roberts never faced the sort of criticism leveled at the likes of Jim and Tammy Bakker for their personal excesses. Criticism of him was often tempered by the belief that Roberts was no outright charlatan, but rather a sincere, if maybe misguided, man motivated by his theology, as well as his mounting personal tragedies — the loss of a daughter in a plane crash in 1977, the 1982 suicide of his eldest son, Ronnie, who had battled drug addiction, and the death of a grandchild, the only heir to be named after him, who died two days after birth in 1984.

Roberts often said that his own fate was sealed before birth, but his slew of professed visions over the years may have colored his early history, making it seem more parable than fact.

A preacher’s son, Granville Oral Roberts was born Jan. 24, 1918, in Pontotoc County, near Ada, Okla., the youngest of five children.

Roberts later recalled that his mother was pregnant with him when she was asked to pray for a neighbor’s seriously ill child. A Cherokee Indian, his mother vowed that if God healed the child, she would dedicate her own unborn child to the ministry. She prayed, too, that she deliver a blue-eyed son (her other children had black eyes). According to Roberts, every wish came true; the sick child recovered, Oral was born with blue eyes and his mother told him early on that he was set to do God’s work.

But Roberts had much to overcome, including a stuttering condition and the constraints of poverty. In his book, “My Story,” Roberts said that one of his first encounters with faith healing occurred at 17, when stricken with tuberculosis he was healed by a traveling evangelist.

On Christmas Day 1938, Roberts married Evelyn Lutman Fahnestock, the daughter of a minister. Over the next few years, Roberts served as pastor of several small churches and attended Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee. In 1947, Roberts, then 29, moved to Tulsa from Enid, Okla. His ministry flourished when he began traveling nationwide, laying hands on the sick in revival tents and proclaiming the newly faithful healed in the name of God.

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Collins Steele, who worked for Roberts at the time, once recalled standing outside the enormous revival tent and counting 13 ambulances rolling through the mud carrying people on stretchers. “And dozens and hundreds were healed,” he told the Tulsa Tribune. “If you didn’t see it, well, it’s so difficult to believe.”

Roberts didn’t respond when the Church of Christ offered him $1,000 if a group of doctors could verify these miracles, but that didn’t stop the crowds from flocking to Roberts’ side.

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In 1954, Roberts became the second evangelist to appear on television — Rex Humbard was the first by a few months — when NBC began broadcasting his tent crusades. He switched to a half-hour Sunday show 13 years later, and by 1977, his Sunday morning show reached 1.1 million households and was the top-rated religious program on television.

In 1961, Roberts declared that God told him to build a university. Most Tulsans assumed that Roberts foresaw a small Bible college, but Roberts had other ideas and soon, gold-covered buildings rose from Oklahoma’s flatland. In 1965, Oral Roberts University, a four-year, liberal arts, Christian institution, opened its doors. Formal dedication ceremonies were held in 1967, when friend Billy Graham led a sermon on the new grounds.

“Oral Roberts was a man of God, and a great friend in ministry,” Graham said in a statement. “I loved him as a brother.”

Today the university has more than 3,000 students enrolled and offers more than 75 undergraduate degrees and graduate programs in business, education, nursing, and theology.

In 1993, Roberts’ son, Richard, was elected as the university’s second president and Roberts assumed the position of chancellor, a title he held until the time of his death.

In September, Mark Rutland, president of Southeastern University in Lakeland, Fla., succeeded Richard Roberts, who had resigned after being embroiled in a scandal related to lavish spending.

“The past few months, my father has talked about going home to be with the Lord on a daily basis. He has run his race and finished his course,” the younger Roberts said in a statement. “Now he is in heaven, and we as Christians have the Bible promise that someday we will be reunited.”

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Even in his last years, Roberts remained active, traveling nationwide and penning a new book, “Still Doing the Impossible.”

“I can’t figure out God,” an 84-year-old Roberts said in a January 2002 appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” “I don’t know if I’d had been God, I’d have chosen me … But David says that God’s ways are past finding out and I believe that.”

Preceded in death by his wife, Evelyn, Roberts is survived by his son and a daughter, Roberta Potts, as well as 12 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.