Oral Roberts and the Healing-Television Era
Oral Roberts brought Pentecostal healing services to network television in the 1950s and founded Oral Roberts University in Tulsa in 1965.
Granville Oral Roberts (1918–2009) was the son of a Pentecostal Holiness preacher in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma. After being healed of tuberculosis as a teenager, he entered ministry, and in 1947 launched the Healing Waters tent crusades that would tour the United States for the next two decades.
In 1954 he became the first televangelist to broadcast a healing service on network television — a move that drew both wide audiences and sustained criticism from mainline denominations. In 1965 he opened Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which now enrols around 4,500 students and remains one of the most prominent Pentecostal universities in the world.
Roberts moved formally from the Pentecostal Holiness Church into the United Methodist Church in 1968, an early sign of how the Charismatic movement was beginning to cross denominational lines. His influence on televangelism and on a generation of Pentecostal preachers is widely acknowledged.