Granville Oral Roberts was born January 24, 1918, near Ada, Oklahoma, the son of a Pentecostal Holiness preacher. A conversion experience at 17, followed by what he described as a healing from tuberculosis, set the course of his ministry: divine healing, demonstrated in public, would remain its center for the rest of his life.
Roberts founded the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1947 and spent the following years touring the country in tent revivals, praying individually over the sick in meetings that could run for hours. Television let him take the format further than any tent could reach. Oral Roberts and You brought filmed healing lines into American living rooms, making him the first evangelist to lead large televised healing crusades and, by his organization's own count, someone who personally prayed over 1,500,000 people across his career.
He used the income and visibility of the crusades to build institutions rather than simply sustain them. Oral Roberts University opened in Tulsa in 1963, and the City of Faith Medical and Research Center, a hospital and research complex intended to combine prayer with modern medicine, followed in the 1980s at a completed cost of about 150,000,000 dollars against a full planned build reported at up to 250,000,000 dollars. The City of Faith closed in 1989, having reportedly drained the organization of 30,000,000 to 40,000,000 dollars a year, a scale of ambition and a scale of financial strain that together defined Roberts as clearly as the healing lines that made him famous.