Oral Roberts to the Rescue?*

By David Van Biema

In 1987, television preacher Oral Roberts made a dramatic appeal. If his
supporters did not send donations totaling $8 million dollars within
three months, he warned that God would "call me home." There were those
who complained that Roberts was extorting his viewers and using the
Deity as an accomplice, but there was no doubting his charisma — or his
results. Roberts received over $9 million, and God did not call him home.

Now, at age 89, the Tulsa, Okla., university that bears his name has
called Roberts home from a California retirement — under the most
excruciating of circumstances. On Wednesday, the head regent at Oral
Roberts University announced that the school is an astonishing $52.5
million in debt. This news arrived just three weeks after the revelation
of a wrongful termination suit filed against the school by three former
professors who claim that they were fired after providing the school's
Board of Regents with a report detailing moral and ethical lapses by
Oral's son Richard, who had inherited the school's presidency from his
father, and Richard's wife Lindsay. Among the allegations: the Roberts
had remodeled their home eleven times in 14 years with university money;
they bankrolled one of their daughters' $29,411 trip to the Bahamas with
school funds; and Lindsay Roberts had spent the night in an O.R.U.
guest-house with an underage male nine times.

Early in October Richard Roberts, 59, told students the suit amounted to
"intimidation, blackmail and extortion," and appeared with his wife on
Larry King Live to deny the allegations. Nevertheless, on October 17
Richard took a leave of absence from the university presidency and Oral
Roberts returned to the campus chapel last Monday to announce, "The
devil is not going to steal O.R.U." He received a standing ovation and
was renamed O.R.U.'s co-president, but George Pearsons, chairman of the
school's Board of Regents, seems intent on limiting his influence. "He
is the founder. He is a great icon," Pearsons told The Daily Oklahoman.
"But the bottom line is, any decision is going to come down to the
board." The school has hired a Washington, D.C., law firm to run an
independent investigation and an audit. It suggested that the
professors' case could be solved by mediation, but the ex-teachers'
lawyer has so far refused to engage.

The whole affair is a sad denouement for one of the pioneers of
televangelism, a man who, in the early 1980s, seemed poised to pull the
then-declasse Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions, which emphasize
gifts of the Holy Spirit such as healing and speaking in tongues, into
the mainstream. Says Randall Balmer, chair of the religion department at
Barnard College, who has written about Roberts, "I feel badly for him.
This must be a blow."

What happened? J. Lee Grady, the editor of the magazine Charisma, wrote
recently, "I don't know about you, but I'm having flashbacks of 1987,"
the year that the sexploits of Jimmy Swaggart and financial hijinks of
Jim Bakker gave televangelism its reputation for sleaze. But while the
allegations in the suit certainly meet Swaggart-quality standards of
salaciousness, the causes of the university's fall may owe more to
mismanagement than greed or negligence, suggests John Schmalzbauer, an
expert in Christian higher education at Missouri State University.
Unless some party siphoned off "massive multimillion-dollar diversion of
funds over 25 years," he says, "I think the causes must be deeper and
more structural."

The school had a history of ambitious ventures that verged on
recklessness. Roberts decided to make it an athletic force, and as
recently as last year its basketball team advanced to the NCAA March
Madness. But its big-ticket failures may in the end have been more
telling. For years it offered a law program, but eventually ended up
selling it to Pat Robertson. The amount of the possible losses involved
are not immediately available, but documentation exists of an even
bigger money pit, the City of Faith Medical Center, a combination
physical and spiritual healing facility.

City of Faith represented a fascinating attempt to pull charismatic
faith healing into a context that would be accepted by the general
public. But In 1987, TIME reported that the medical center, which cost
$250 million to build, was draining Roberts of $30 million to $40
million a year. In his 1995 autobiography, Expect a Miracle: My Life and
Ministry, Roberts revealed that he had undertaken his unorthodox $8
million "Call me home" fund drive because God had told him to keep the
Center afloat or be prepared to perish. There is some irony in the fact
that this last-ditch effort to float his bid for mainstream credibility
provided the very ammunition used by his critics to relegate him
permanently to the Christian fringe.

Despite the cash infusion, City of Faith closed in 1989. If it continued
to bleed money in its last two years at the same rate it had been, then
it could conceivably account for the entire current debt, or the
beginning of a negative spiral. Alternatively, it could simply be
indicative of a faith-based accounting style that much of Evangelicalism
left behind long ago, with the founding in the 1970s of the Evangelical
Council for Financial Accountability, a 2000-member self-policing group
that stresses not just fiscal honesty but efficient accounting
practices. Like many Pentecostal and charismatic institutions, O.R.U. is
not a member.