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.

At first, Lester wasn’t going to take the request seriously. A small church in Indiana? What about the billions of lost souls in the cities of the world? But the Lord began to speak in the quiet of Lester’s heart, say­ing, “You’ll never understand My heart if you don’t pastor…a pastor gets into the sorrows of the family….He understands what it means to be a shepherd because I am a shepherd.”

It was a hard decision, but Lester knew he had to obey. When he arrived at the church, he found the building to be too old and confining for use. After convincing the congregation to sell it, he soon chose a new location in the center of town. The new, larger building that would house Calvary Temple was built nearly debt-free because of the miraculous of­ferings that poured in. The Lord brought well-known evangelists like Oral Roberts to the new church to preach. Within months, the small congregation was averaging 2,500 participants in Sunday school, and all of the people were growing in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. There were salvations and healings regularly at Calvary Temple as God moved among His people. The Sumrall family grew there, as well, with the birth of a second son, Stephen.

Roberts Liardon tells us that in the midst of all of these marvelous blessings, the call to the mis­sion field continued to burn in Lester’s heart.

During a short-term mission trip to Asia in 1950, Lester conducted a three-day crusade in Manila, Philippines. Even though it had been five years since World War II, the country was still shrouded in a spirit of gloom. During the crusade, hundreds of people responded to the hope and joy found in the gospel of Christ. When Lester left the city, he de­spaired that there was no shepherd to guide these new sheep in his absence.

They called it the “Canvas Tabernacle.” Lester and Howard set up the large tent in Brisbane, Australia, for their first outreach to the lost in their travels together. Night after night, Les­ter preached the gospel, speaking of the saving power of the blood of Christ, and hundreds of people came to the altar to receive salvation for their souls and healing for their bodies. What an exciting way to begin the new ministry!

One night, a man approached the altar in a great deal of pain and with many questions con­cerning supernatural healing. The pain in this man’s side and back had confounded his doctors for years. When Lester explained God’s healing power, the man reacted with fear and uneasiness. “The pain may appear to be gone, but it will return tonight,” was the gentleman’s response, revealing his inner conflict of faith versus fear. With conviction, Lester reassured him that God had done a complete healing.

Roberts Liardon tells us that the next evening, the same man arrived at the revival meeting, grin­ning from ear to ear. “Preacher, I am healed! I have not had a pain in my body since last night!” he announced.119 As a result of this and other heal­ing testimonies, the faith of the people grew each day. A young woman with a cancerous sore on her nose approached the altar for prayer; within days, the sore was healed completely.

The time seemed to pass swiftly, and Lester and Howard’s last eve­ning in Australia was filled with praises to God for His blessings on their ministry there.

It was the morning of his seventeenth birthday, and Lester Sumrall was dying. After months of lying in a sickbed with tuberculosis, he had reached his end. Everyone agreed that his life was ending. The coughing that racked his lungs was out of control. His pillow, splattered with blood from his spasms throughout the long night, was a witness to his shattered life.

Roberts Liardon tells us that this fateful day, February 15, 1930, was a day of days. The ninetythree-pound, emaciated young man began to cough up blobs of tissue that the doctor declared were part of his lungs. Shaking his head in defeat, the doctor entered Lester’s room for the last time.

“In two hours, your boy will be dead,” he said gravely to George and Betty Sumrall. “That’s the death rattle in his throat right now, and that bluishness in his face means he’s not getting enough blood to his brain for his body to live. He’s going to die tonight.”

The doctor left the Sumrall house and went back to his office to write out Lester’s death certificate. He left the exact time of death blank, knowing it was just an administrative detail easy to attend to. George Sumrall would need to pick up the death certificate first thing in the morning so that he could go and buy a burial plot for his son.

George Sumrall was a rough man who hardly believed in God and definitely didn’t believe in the power of prayer. He left his son’s deathbed with a mixture of grief and anger. Betty Sumrall was the opposite. A firm believer in the power of Jesus Christ to save and heal, she was not ready to give up her son. She stayed by Lester’s bedside, crying and praying for God to intervene and save her boy’s life.

Jeffreys discovered the mortgages for all of the churches they had planted and became deeply concerned about the financial situation of the denomination. Jeffreys and Phillips viewed these mortgages differ­ently. Jeffreys, coming from a working-class background, saw them as a burden of dangerous debt obligations, while Phillips, coming from a middle-class business background, viewed them as proper business agreements. Jeffreys shared his concerns with all of the Elim congre­gations through the church magazine Elim Evangel, an act that publicly made Phillips appear to be a poor administrator. Jeffreys introduced a Jubilee Fund and asked readers to give money and help alleviate the debt on many of the Elim church buildings. After several months, the congre­gations had given what amounted to a small percentage of what Jeffreys had hoped to raise.

Roberts Liardon tells us that one unforeseen outcome of Jeffreys’ concern over the finances was Phillips’s strong personal reaction to it. Phillips felt that his abilities and judgments were being publicly questioned by Jeffreys. Because the church assets were worth more than the debt liabilities, and because all of the mortgage payments were being met, Phillips was certain that they were not in the midst of a financial crisis. He suggested that Jeffreys concentrate on raising money in his evangelistic efforts and leave the accounting work to the administrative staff. This argument put an ad­ditional strain on the relationship between Jeffreys and Phillips.

Early in 1937, Jeffreys wrote a number of letters to Phillips voicing his concerns about church government reform in the Elim movement. “God had spoken to me in no uncertain sound, ‘Set your house in or­der.’”60 This was the same command that the prophet Isaiah brought to King Hezekiah in the Old Testament. (See 2 Kings 20:1.) To Jeffreys, it meant two things: He was to continue in his efforts to pay off the debts of the denomination, and he was to work diligently to reform Elim from being a church governed by centralized control to one with more power delegated to the local assemblies.

On returning home in December, he shared his testimony with people there, resulting in a move of the Spirit that aroused great interest, as well as some opposition. Visitors arrived from many places.

Roberts Liardon tells us that one of them was an Anglican minister, Alexander Boddy, from Sunderland in the north of England. On his return home, he invited Barratt to hold meetings in Sunderland, testifying that what he had observed in Norway was greater than that which he had witnessed during the Welsh Revival.

On the last day of August 1907, Barratt arrived, and he stayed in Sunderland until early October. A number of people were baptized in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues, including Boddy’s wife, Mary, and their young daughters, Mary and Jane. It was during the last few days of Barratt’s meetings that the local newspaper took an interest in what was taking place. The news then spread to larger newspapers and Boddy soon found his home besieged by reporters. Boddy himself was not baptized in the Spirit until December, after Barratt had left. The following year, Boddy organized the first in a series of Annual Pentecostal conferences in Sunderland that continued until 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. It would be at these meetings that Boddy’s path would intersect with that of Jeffreys.

Roberts Liardon tells u ss that Some of the people of Wales welcomed this Pentecostal teaching. Early in 1910, George and Stephen Jeffreys began to attend Petnecostal meetings held by the Welsh Baptist minister, William George Hill. Previously, the brothers had been opposed to this teaching, but shortly thereafter, they had accepted the scriptural basis for this as a present-day experience, specifically, Matthew 3:11: “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.”

When he returned from Washington, Sproul informed the mayor that he had been pronounced incurable by the physicians there and given a certificate of total disability for life. He was awarded a monthly dis­ability payment, but he still faced a future filled with unrelenting pain.

By the providence of God, soon after Sproul’s return from Washing­ton, he saw an advertisement for Evangelist F. F. Bosworth’s campaign in Pittsburgh. He went simply because he felt he had nothing to lose. As he sat and listened to the testimonies of those who had given their hearts to Christ, the Spirit moved in his soul. He later exclaimed, “Oh, the joy that filled my soul when I realized the Lord was ready to save me, right then, and I said, ‘Yes’ to God. How I longed to be able to speak, to tell people that I knew I was saved!”

When Bosworth called for those who wished to be healed to come forward, John Sproul walked up to the platform with a heart full of faith. After prayer, a Christian brother exclaimed, “Praise the Lord,” and Sproul thought the man meant that he should praise the Lord with his own voice. “Of all the foolish things,” John reasoned, “to expect me to praise the Lord when I can’t talk!” Then, he thought, Well, that isn’t faith. I’ll try, even if nobody hears it.

Roberts Liardon tells us that the moment he made the effort to praise the Lord, a strange power seemed to fill his whole body. Pain coursed through him from his stom­ach through his throat and into his head. It was excruciating, but in an instant, it was gone. With it went all of the agonizing pain that John had experienced for four years. There was no more lung pain, no more throat pain, and no more wheezing! At the top of his voice, he yelled, “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!” Soon after the service, his family cautioned John to be careful with his newly recovered voice, but his response was, “I was shouting His praises, and I knew as long as I praised God, noth­ing would ever happen to my voice.”

Being a farmer’s son, Fred was adept at using the resources around him. For example, when his uncle gave him the runt of a pig litter to have as his own, he fattened up the pig and sold it at the local market. With that money, the industrious boy bought a cow, raised her, fattened her up, and traded her and her calf for a brand-new cornet. Now that he had his coveted instrument, he needed money for lessons. Undaunted, Fred pored over the old organ’s elementary instruction book in their farm­house parlor, and that is how he learned to read music and play notes.

Roberts Liardon tells us that Fred purchased the most advanced cornet music book he could find. While working in his father’s feed store, he would practice for hours when business was slow. He studied the notes, learned the musical val­ues, and practiced diligently. Early in his life, he showed the persever­ance that would take him through difficult times and even persecution in years to come.

Soon, Fred was skilled enough as a musician to play in a community band. When his family moved to University Place, Nebraska, he audi­tioned and won a seat in the Nebraska State Band. One day, this young man’s fine musical talent would even grace the stage in New York City.

By the age of sixteen, Fred Bosworth was itching to be out on his own. In addition to his natural aptitude for music, he was a natural sales­man. He met a “general agent” who wanted him to sell a variety of prod­ucts, including cement for building industries. Fred and his older brother “rode the rails” around the State of Nebraska, often jumping open train cars to ride for free, as they tried to make their fortune as traveling sales­men. On one of these adventures, Fred’s life was changed forever.

You have to understand that when you’re speaking in tongues, sometimes you’re speaking to God and sometimes you’re working with God. When you’re working with God in the spirit, the Holy Spirit will use your prayer language to effect things in the earth. That’s where intercessory prayer comes from.

Roberts Liardon most Bible teachers today only teach about the kind of tongues that people speak to God with. They don’t know much about praying with God.

Now when you’re praying with God, you’re not lifting your voice and asking Him for things, you’re yielding your mouth to the Holy Spirit so He can make intercession through you. The Holy Spirit can pray through you either in tongues or in your native language.

Sometimes while I’m praying in tongues, I instantly understand what I’m saying. You may have had that happen to you, but you didn’t know what it was. It may have seemed like your mind was giving you some nice little verses and you didn’t register it as the Holy Spirit interpreting your prayer language.

Oral Roberts, the high-profile healing evangelist who blazed a trail of miracles across postwar America, tells how interpreting his personal prayer language helped him build a university for the Lord in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

As Oral was walking across a cow pasture one day and praying in tongues, the Lord said to him, “Oral, I want you buy the land you’re walking on, and build Me a university.” He knew it was God speaking to him, but he had no idea how to build something as large as a university. So he walked back and forth across the field praying in tongues and then waited for the interpretation.

Roberts Liardon tells us that when the interpretation came, Oral spoke out in English what he had been praying in tongues. That’s how he knew what to do and when to do it. That’s how he found out how to raise enough money to get it done. Oral allowed the Spirit of God to interpret back to his mind what he was communicating and talking to God about in tongues.

Today, Oral Roberts University (ORU) has 22 major buildings and is valued at more than $250 million dollars and over 10,000 students have passed through its classrooms.