Claudius Roberts had prayed that her last child would be tall and strong and would show features of his Indian heritage. She’d asked God for a blue-eyed boy, even though all of her other children had dark brown eyes. When the baby boy was born, Claudius rejoiced that God had answered every one of her prayers.
What she couldn’t fully realize at the time was that this baby—Granville Oral Roberts—would become one of God’s most anointed men in the second half of the twentieth century. Are there enough words to do justice to Roberts’s powerful preaching and healing tent ministry to tens of thousands in the 1950s? Can we explain his inspirational call to build the largest Christian university in the world in the 1960s, the wisdom of his trendsetting television ministry to millions in the 1970s, the controversies and personal tragedy that surrounded his ministry in the 1980s, or the place that Oral Roberts holds in the church today?
I was the first baby born in Oral Roberts’s school of medicine. In fact, Oral was such a hero to my family that I was named Kenneth Roberts Liardon, but I chose to go by Roberts. As a child, I remember being in Tulsa at a Partner’s Weekend—a gathering of his financial supporters— where Oral began to pray for everyone in the room. At one point, he went over to a line of partners who were in wheelchairs. He went down the line, laying hands on each one and praying. One after another, they got up out of their chairs. I had never seen anything like it. Oh, there was the rare, occasional healing in my home church, but nothing like the sight of a line of people rising from their wheelchairs and walking.
Roberts Liardon tells us that it is essentially impossible to describe in detail a global ministry that has spanned seventy-plus years. Oral Roberts brought Pentecostalism to the right side of the tracks. He gave it respectability and dignity. My desire in this edition of God’s Generals is to highlight specific areas of this anointed man’s life: from his humble beginnings to the position of leadership and power he held in the latter half of the twentieth century, to the unfortunate scandals that pursued him, and, finally, to the place his ministry holds today. This is the amazing story of how God used one fallible human being who was willing to surrender his entire life in obedience to the call of an infallible God.
