In the spring of 1983, a new slate of officers was elected for the Oral Roberts University Student Associations. After 2 1/2 years as campus film chairman, I had run for the office of vice president in charge of student activities, and had been elected handily, with 75 percent of the vote against two opponents (one of whom was Joel Osteen’s sister, long before anyone knew who Joel Osteen would turn out to be).

The new slate of officers was invited to have lunch with President Oral Roberts in his offices on campus. That’s when this photo was taken:

From Drop Box

Oral Roberts died this afternoon in California.

Obviously, my sympathies are with the family, and with the faculty and student body at my alma mater, ORU.

As anyone who knows me is aware, I have a lot of negative attitudes towards TV evangelism in general, towards Richard Roberts, and towards what the Oral Roberts television ministry became over time. But I also had a great deal of respect for what Oral Roberts was able to achieve. ORU was a good place for me, and in some ways my time there was one of the happiest periods of my life, and a key growth period for me spiritually (although that growth wasn’t always in the exact directions which the Powers That Be would have intended). At the period in the late 1970s when I was looking at colleges, ORU’s stated emphasis on balancing the academic, the spiritual and the athletic appealed greatly to me.

I think one of the great tragedies of TV evangelism is that most of the people involved in it did not start out to be Elmer Gantry. I do not share the pop culture stereotype that televangelists are all greedy malefactors rubbing their hands together in glee as they marvel at the stupidity of their followers. I think many TV evangelists start out with the best of intentions, and, even when they are using the wrong means, have convinced themselves that they still have the correct ends in mind.

Despite my many disagreements with what the ministry became, I believe Oral Roberts started out with the best of intentions. But TV evangelism is the polar opposite of real ministry, and it has a corrupting influence on virtually anyone who practices it. At the risk of repeating previous blog posts, that corrupting influence comes in several forms:

Shifting of purpose: Originally, in an ideal situation, the purpose of a TV ministry is to spread the Gospel. But a TV ministry is incredibly expensive, and so it must almost always rely on a viewer-donation model. That inevitably requires that some part of the telecast be devoted to asking for money, and it inevitably requires that the sensibilities of current and potential donors take on an undue importance when determining the content of the show. So eventually, the show stops being about spreading the Gospel and becomes about raising the money to keep the show on the air. And potentially-challenging messages must be avoided, lest they offend current or potential donors. So the program becomes a festival of pandering and pleading.

Self-aggrandizement: The financial and competitive pressures (I doubt that most TV evangelists would admit to competitive pressures, but it’s only logical) of the industry require that any TV evangelist position himself or herself as God’s uniquely anointed servant. That’s a hard, hard burden to bear, and something that I doubt many people would have the strength to live through. How do you keep from starting to believe your own publicity? Back when I was at ORU, a story went around that there were gold plumbing fixtures in Oral Roberts’ office perched atop the ORU graduate center. Defenders of the ministry were quick to say that the appointments there weren’t paid for from general funds, sent in by blue-haired little old ladies watching Oral on the TV. No, a friend of the ministry supposedly gave a donation especially for decorating the office. If that is true, and I have no way of knowing, it’s still cause for concern. Can it be healthy — can it be conducive to true Christianity — for someone to curry your favor by buying you a solid-gold faucet? (I didn’t use the facilities during my lunch in Oral Roberts’ office, so I never saw the fixtures.)

Oral Roberts’ early ministry was focused on charismatic ideas of God’s healing power. I pray for people who are sick and believe that sometimes things happen which are beyond human explanation. I do not necessarily subscribe to charismatic ideas of healing on demand, healing as public spectacle, healing as a test of our faith.

Oral Roberts was careful, during the period when I was an ORU student, to at least give lip service to the idea that it was God who healed people, and if he claimed any special status it was more that he was an example of what he felt that God was empowering all of us to do. But charismatic healing ministries too often take on the aura of being about one person’s special magical powers.

Siege mentality: Closely related to self-aggrandizement is the notion that any criticism of you and your work is, obviously and irrefutably, the work of the devil. I was associated for many years with a humor magazine, now on hiatus, which lampooned TV evangelists. The key people behind the magazine were Christians, who saw themselves as casting light on wrong being done in the name of Christ. The targets of their satire often thought otherwise, and would deride the magazine as Satan’s tool.

During the period when I attended ORU, Oral Roberts was perhaps at his most mainstream in terms of theology. He was actually a member of Boston Avenue United Methodist Church in downtown Tulsa, and the theology school at ORU was headed by Dr. James Buskirk, a (justly) revered Methodist preacher. Within a few years after my graduation, the United Methodist Church had pulled its approval from the seminary, and Oral began attending a non-denominational charismatic fellowship which met in ORU’s basketball arena and which Richard Roberts had already been attending for some time. There’s nothing wrong with that; I still have friends from ORU who attend that church. I only point it out as a possible turning point in his theology.

As Oral went through his “700-foot Jesus” and “send money or God will call me home” debacles, some of the doubts that I had already begun having as an ORU student began to increase. As the torch was passed to Oral’s son Richard — for whom I had zero respect even as a wide-eyed ORU student — I began to disassociate myself with the ministry even further, and I was embarrassed to talk too much about my college diploma.

In 2007, some scandals involving Richard caused the university to sever its financial ties with the TV ministry. That left the university in a bind — whatever else you can say about the Oral Roberts TV ministry, it helped pay for my education, and thousands of others. The family which owns Hobby Lobby stores — devout Christians but with no previous ties to ORU — stepped forward and donated huge amounts of money to keep the school afloat.

You will notice that the photo above is somewhat discolored around the edges. That is because it has been hanging, exposed to the sunlight, in my bedroom for all these many years. I’ve disassociated myself from TV evangelism, and from much that the Roberts family has said and done in the quarter-century since my graduation. But I could never bring myself to take the photo down. For me, it represents the good that Oral Roberts did, and the good intentions that created a worthy academic institution.