GO TO SITE 
(born January 24, 1918) is an American neo-Pentecostal televangelist. He is also a leader in the charismatic movement and a former faith healer.
Early life
Roberts was born in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, as Granville "Oral" Roberts, the fifth and youngest child of the Rev. Ellis Melvin Roberts and Claudia Priscilla Irwin. His mother was one-quarter Cherokee.
He left high school and his further education consists of about two years of college study at Oklahoma Baptist University and Phillips University. In 1938, he married a preacher's daughter, Evelyn Lutman Fahnestock. Their marriage lasted 66 years until her death on May 4, 2005. During their life together, they expanded his ministry from preaching in tents to preaching on the radio. Roberts became one of the forerunners on television and attracted a vast viewership. Further, he has written more than 120 books such as Miracle of Seed-Faith and his autobiography, Expect a Miracle.
Roberts originally made a name for himself with a mobile big tent "that sat 3,000 on metal folding chairs and he shouted at petitioners who did not respond to his healing."Roberts became a traveling faith healer after dropping out of college.
Later life
The Praying Hands, on the ORU campus in Tulsa, OK.Oral Roberts has conducted more than 300 evangelistic and faith healing crusades on six continents and has appeared as a guest speaker for hundreds of national and international meetings and conventions. Modern faith healers like Oral Roberts may share roots with traditional exorcism and the more contemporary Emmanuel movement, a pre-Freudian psychotherapy founded by Dr. Elwood Worcester in which Protestant clergy attempted to claim religious authority over their patients' ailments. In the healing line, thousands of sick people would wait to stand before Oral Roberts so he could pray for them and lay his right hand on their afflicted body. According to his autobiography, there are many people healed in this manner and able to offer proof from several doctors, and they are eager to give testimonals of the details of these healings and deliverances conducted in this manner.
In 1947, Roberts resigned his pastoral ministry with the Pentecostal Holiness Church to found Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association. He later founded Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1963, stating he was obeying a command from God. The university was chartered in 1963 and received its first students in 1965. Students were required to sign an honor code pledging not to drink, smoke, dance, party, or engage in premarital sex.
Another part of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association is the Abundant Life Prayer Group, which operates day and night. The group receives thousands of calls for prayer daily from around the world.
In 1977 Roberts claimed to have a vision from a 900-foot-tall Jesus who told him to build City of Faith Medical and Research Center and the hospital would be a success.
In 1980, Roberts said he had a vision which encouraged him to continue the construction of his City of Faith Medical and Research Center, which opened in 1981. At the time, it was among the largest health facilities of its kind in the world and sought to merge prayer and medicine in the healing process. The City of Faith was in operation for only eight years before closing in late 1989. The Orthopedic Hospital of Oklahoma still operates on its premises.
Two of Oral Roberts' children are currently living: son Richard and daughter Roberta Potts. Another daughter, Rebecca Nash, died in a plane crash on February 11, 1977, with her husband, businessman Marshall Nash. Roberts' eldest son, Ronald, committed suicide in June 1982 at the age of 37 after getting a court order to get counseling at a drug treatment center in February.
In 1983 Roberts said Jesus had appeared to him in person and commissioned him to find a cure for cancer.
In 1987, during a fund raising drive, Roberts announced to a television audience that unless he raised $8 million by that March, God would "call him home" (a euphemism for death). Some were fearful that he was referring to suicide given the passionate pleas and tear that accompanied his statement. He raised $9.1 million. Later that year, he announced that God had raised the dead through Roberts' ministry.[12]
He stirred controvery, when as TIME carried in 1987, that he and his son, Richard Roberts as witness, claimed that he had seen his father raise a child from the dead. That year, the Bloom County comic strip recast its character, Bill the Cat as a satirized televangelist, "Fundamentally Oral Bill".
By 1987 he started to "re-emphasizing faith healing and is reaching for his old-time constituency."[13] However, his income continued to slide (from $88 million in 1980 to $55 million in 1986, according to the Tulsa Tribune) and his largely vacant City of Faith Medical Center continued to lose money ($10.7 million in 1986 alone).
From the late 1980's to 1992 Roberts maintained a residence in the exclusive St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida. Roberts would commute via private jet from his base in Oklahoma to Boca Raton airport for weekend visits to his golf club retreat. Most of the other residents of St. Andrews were Jewish, and since Roberts was identified by his first name of Granville when he was visiting Florida his presence went mostly unrecognized.
In a 2004, television broadcast of Kenneth Copeland's Victory in Jesus, the elder Roberts claimed to have experienced a vision in which "A dark cloud surrounded New York," purportedly a "wake up call" to tell people that Christ's return is soon. A transcript of this meeting is available online.[14] Roberts explicitly stated on several christian TV shows that this cloud would literally appear over New York before the end of 2005 as a clear sign from God.
On May 4, 2005, Evelyn, Roberts' wife of 66 years, died.