Editor’s note: The following excerpt is adapted from Oral Roberts’ autobiography, Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry, pages 316-329 (1995, Thomas Nelson Publishers). Reprinted with permission.
In 1968, I received a telephone call from Bishop Angie Smith, who was over the Oklahoma Conference of the United Methodist Church, and Dr. Finis Crutchfield, pastor of Boston Avenue Methodist Church (Tulsa’s largest), to invite me to meet with them on a matter of importance. The meeting resulted in the bishop’s invitation to transfer my ordination to the Methodist church.
I said, "Bishop Smith, do you understand I am Pentecostal and charismatic in experience, that I speak in tongues daily and pray for the sick as a healing evangelist?"
He said, "Yes, I do. That’s the reason I am inviting you."
I replied, "If the Lord leads me to do this, you must understand I must be free to be myself and true to my calling and way of worshiping God."
The bishop replied, "Dr. Roberts, if you change, we don’t want you."
Dr. Crutchfield added, "Oral, during the past several months, Bishop Smith has received dozens of letters and phone calls from Methodist pastors and laypeople to ask you to join us. We need you."
"Will I be totally free to preach and pray for people as I’m led of God?" I asked.
"In the Methodist church, we have a free pulpit," the bishop said. "While you’re in the pulpit, no man can stop you."
I really responded to that. I said, "Bishop Smith, let me lay before you a revelation I believe I have received from God. I believe the structure of the Methodist church and the hunger I’ve seen among the people to become as spiritual as the church was in the beginning when John Wesley founded it make it one of the only historical denominations where a renewing of the Holy Spirit can happen. The Spirit has spoken to me about this. If you really want me, and you give me my freedom, I’ll consult with my leaders at ORU and the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association and let you know as soon as possible."
With that, we joined hands and prayed.
I consulted first with Bob DeWeese, with whom I was very close in my ministry and whose spiritual judgment I admired the most.
Bob, as crusade director and my coevangelist, had borne the brunt of the criticism of pastors in the cities where we went for crusades. He was wise enough to keep all but the constructive part from me, leaving my mind free to stay with my preaching instead of being tempted to strike back at the critics. Only God knows what Bob endured—and without developing a bad attitude in return. Not once had he ever drawn me into one of those controversies. His help was priceless to me.
Bob, however, was stinging from what he felt was the mistreatment, some of it deliberate, over the years. He just had grace to bear it. In my conferring with him on a step I was seriously considering taking, which would have ramifications nationwide, he looked straight at me for several moments.
"Oral," he said, "I don’t know how you’ve survived these twenty-one years under the most intense pressures I’ve ever known against a man of God, but you have. While many of our Pentecostal brethren have cooperated and benefited, many, especially, some leaders, have been unrelenting in their opposition. And the sad thing is that in their hearts, they believe in healing and the miraculous. But because they seek to control, they have, in effect, joined those who fight God’s healing power being poured out upon the people through your ministry."
"Bob, I know. But if I take this step, it won’t be because of the stand of some of those leaders and their uncomfortableness with me."
"What else could it be?" he asked.
"You’ve known me and worked closely with me from 1951 to 1968. I ask you, have you ever seen me take a major step unless I felt in my spirit God had spoken to me?"
"No, I haven’t. And I believe that’s the main reason I’ve stayed with you. Are you saying God has spoken to you about this move?"
"Yes, I am. And you know that my main thrust is to get people saved, healed, and filled with the Holy Spirit. I believe without the miraculous and the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the denominations as we know them will get colder and colder and less and less effective—and all in the face of Jesus’ soon coming."
"Yes, I know that. You’ve even established ORU on God’s authority and the Holy Spirit."
"I ask you, Bob, in the fear of God, how do you feel about my accepting the bishop’s invitation to bring my ministry into the Methodist church?"
Bob’s countenance brightened, and he said, "I think you should do it. God raised you up to take His healing power to your generation, and this will give you a new and larger platform on which to do it. I only wish I were coming into the Methodist church with you."
Soon the Lord gave me a Scripture for guidance: "For a great door and effectual is opened unto me, and there are many adversaries" (1 Cor 16:9).
I caught on immediately. He was giving me an open door through the Methodist church, but there would be many adversaries.
So when the bishop presented me at the 1968 annual conference in Oklahoma City, I was very aware of the open door and the adversaries. But I was obeying God, and obedience has always been essential to my walk with God.
The bishop kindly stated he was not requiring me to be reordained; he was accepting my ordination coming to me by the good man who had ordained me in the beginning, Bishop Dan T. Muse.
Earlier that day I had met with the fourteen-member examining committee for new ministers coming into the conference. I got off to a bad start on the first question: "Dr. Roberts, why do you want to be a Methodist?"
"I don’t," I said.
"Would you care to explain?" the chairman asked.
"I desire to be a Christian, and by coming into the Methodist church at this stage in my ministry, I believe God will use me more to win people to Christ, to bring His healing power to the sick, and to be part of a renewing of the Holy Spirit in the Methodist church."
They asked other questions, which I answered to the best of my judgment and ability. I let them know of my love and respect for them, for the grand old Methodist church, which I had first joined as a young boy in Stratford, Oklahoma. I said that I meant no offense by saying my highest desire was above being a Methodist, which was being a Christian.
I could see, however, what God meant about an open door being accompanied by adversaries, some of which were in that room. Despite that, the vote on the conference floor to receive my ordination was unanimous.
Immediately, the open door opened wide…wide…wide.
God Working Through Me in the Methodist Church
As I look back to 1968 through 1987 as a member of the United Methodist Church’s ministry, I can describe it only as a miracle beyond my own doing. For several months, God dealt with me about a renewing of the Holy Spirit in the great old historic church, and I was to have a large part in it. Like Mary of old when the angel visited her about giving birth to God’s Son, I "pondered" this in my heart.
My father—and his forebears all the way back in Wales—had been Methodist until he received the baptism of the Holy Spirit through the Pentecostal outpouring in 1910. Despite becoming an ordained minister in the Pentecostal Holiness Church, he still loved the Methodist church. Grandfather Roberts, a frontier judge in Pontotoc County, had been both a lay preacher and a steward (a deacon) in the Methodist church in Ada.
I joined the Methodist church at age ten and remained until my conversion and healing at age seventeen when I joined the Pentecostal Holiness Church. But I, too, never lost my love for the Methodists. Great numbers of them had attended the churches I pastored before my healing ministry began. Many Methodist pastors were friendly and open to my healing ministry, and I appreciated them.
I was absolutely delighted that my first invitation was to a black Methodist church. The pastor and the people seemed to be "dancing in their spirits" as I entered the pulpit and later prayed for the healing of their sick. I felt totally at home.
Soon invitations began to arrive from bishops from New York State, North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, Arkansas, Kentucky, and all over to speak at their annual conferences. The subject each of them asked me to cover was the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and healing.
I discovered I really had a free pulpit as I preached exactly as I had in the crusades. I soon learned, however, I couldn’t meet all of the demands and run ORU, my TV ministry, and my ministry to my Pentecostal brethren and all others. During those first several years, the door was wide open to me and my call throughout the Methodist church, and it seemed to me the renewing of the Holy Spirit was meeting a genuine hunger.
Yet some writers in some Methodist publications raised questions concerning whether or not I fit into the denomination, and whether they were a people who wanted a renewal of the Holy Spirit or should embrace healing by faith. The most critical comment came, however, from three or four Methodist seminaries. My message cut right across the German theology that came to America in the early thirties, and that had been embraced by many Methodist theology leaders and professors. There was no room in their theology for a renewal of the Holy Spirit. I felt deeply for the young preachers studying their theology, for I personally knew how easily they could miss out on the work of the Holy Spirit in their ministries.
A Seminary with Theology and God’s Power
Dr. Jimmy Buskirk, a Spirit-filled Methodist professor at Emory University Seminary in Atlanta, had caught the Holy Spirit’s move and God’s healing power. He attended the Sunday evening services of Mt. Paron Church of God in Atlanta, pastored by my dear friend Dr. Paul Walker, who was the chairman of two of my Atlanta crusades.
Jimmy received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. In many respects, he became the most popular professor in the Emory Seminary, which was thought to be the most spiritual and conservative of the Methodist seminaries. As professor of evangelism, he taught overflowing classes, and his name was moving swiftly through charismatic circles.
Jimmy attended my last Memphis crusade, bringing a member of his church with breathing problems with him. He took home a healed man. The next Sunday morning, he had the man give his testimony at his church.
Jimmy was typical of a small but powerful move of the Holy Spirit in the Methodist church. When we met while I was at Emory Seminary to give a speech, we hit it off instantly.
Later, following an invitation to minister to the faculty and students of ORU, Jimmy’s anointed ministry touched us deeply in the Spirit—and perhaps me the most. I saw him as the founding dean of ORU’s new seminary. We had a meeting to discuss the possibility and to make sure he knew where I was coming from.
I began by saying, "Let me put it to you straight whether you feel led to be the founding dean of our graduate School of Theology."
"Please do," he said.
"I believe that the charismatic movement has the power without the theology and that the church at large has a very critical theology without the power. I want the new ORU graduate School of Theology to put the two together, and I want to see the church become the church and therefore become the instrument of the Holy Spirit it is intended to be."
We went back to the day of Pentecost as described in Acts 2 when the Christian church was born. Jimmy said all that happened in the church’s beginning—and was to be happening today—was his theology. He stated that through most of his ministry, he preached things I believed. We may have said them differently, but they meant the same thing.
He said, "Oral, I see now that you come at theology in a systematic way, not on who is right but on what is right, and that is systematic with you. You are a systematic theologian in your thought processes and preaching processes. You lay the whole groundwork from the Bible view. You don’t take bits and pieces, but from a historical view from Genesis to Revelation, you fit everything into a whole. You’re like few people I’ve ever heard or talked to."
After much deliberation and prayer, Jimmy accepted. Soon the seminary was all I had dreamed about, and it grew rapidly.
From the beginning, Jimmy said it would take some doing to staff the seminary with the best people available: "We have to pick believers out of the cesspools. We don’t want to spend the majority of our time defending what we believe. We want to spend our time building on what we believe."
I spent many hours with members of the faculty in both individual and group discussions as we sought the mind of God to be the seminary He wanted us to be. Soon we were accredited, and not long after, the Methodist church put its stamp of accreditation on us for the Methodist young men and women who wanted to graduate from a charismatic seminary.
I did my graduate theology work with the Methodists by correspondence, since they required a master of divinity degree or its equivalent. However, I decided to finish my theological assigns with the ORU Seminary. Dr. Buskirk asked me to do a special dissertation so that if outsiders doubted the authenticity of my theological scholarship, the dissertation alone would convince anyone that I had more than successfully completed the requirements. The ORU Board of Regents asked Dean Buskirk to confer my master of divinity degree on me in their presence. It was a great moment for me.
During Dr. Buskirk’s time as dean from 1975 to 1984, I named him vice provost of Spiritual Affairs, as I had named Dr. Winslow as vice provost for Medical Affairs. Under Jimmy’s spiritual leadership, ORU reached a new high in diversity of student backgrounds in a bond of unity that was precious to me.
I was a classical Pentecostal and charismatic before I transferred to the Methodist church. I was the same during the nine years I was in the Methodist church. I am the same now.
In Jimmy Buskirk, I had found a man of God who, as far as I could discern, walked the same path with me, although he was faithful to his Methodist heritage and loved the church. He hurt for it, he dreamed great dreams for it, and he tried to build a seminary that would be like a beacon to his Methodist brothers and sisters in their seminaries. He longed to see them come out from their growing stance of liberalism and return to the simple roots of John Wesley, whose ministry was the most supernatural in the Holy Spirit the world had seen since the days of the apostles up to his time.
Some 50 percent of ORU’s seminary graduates had been appointed to Methodist churches in Oklahoma, some 20 percent of pastors in the Oklahoma Conference. The other graduates began pastoring in Pentecostal, charismatic, and other churches, including many who built independent churches or ministries.
I urged them, and all other seminary graduates, to ask to go to the smallest or hardest places and then allow the Holy Spirit to empower and lead them in bringing those churches out of the doldrums. They were to pray in the Holy Spirit and strive to become great churches for the Lord and the church. And that’s what they have pretty well done.
The bishops and leaders of other churches asked for more and more of our graduates to become pastors. "We have no trouble with them or their egos; they are happy to go anywhere just so they can let the Holy Spirit work through them," they told me.
I knew the lay Methodists were happy to have young pastors like the ORU seminary-trained ones to be assigned to lead their churches. They told me that time and again.
There was definitely a move of the Holy Spirit on. It was part of the "open door" God had promised me through His Word when I entered the Methodist church. But as such inroads were being made in the great old historic church, there were, as God had said, "many adversaries."
Typical pastors and laypeople were as open to my ministry as I could have asked for in Tulsa, and across America, and as far away as England. Lord J. Arthur Rank, the leading Methodist layman in England, received the baptism of the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues in a meeting he sponsored, "A Day with Oral Roberts," for other Methodist laymen in London. Later, he brought me to England for a crusade, and even the archbishop of Canterbury attended.
Lord Rank was the first to sponsor a chair at ORU, and to my joy, it was a chair on the Holy Spirit with me as the first to occupy it. Today, every entering ORU student is required to take those foundation classes based on what I taught on the Holy Spirit. It’s another way God proved that He meant what He said when He told me to build His university on His authority and on the Holy Spirit.
Meanwhile, the graduate School of Theology, under Dean Jimmy Buskirk, continued to prosper. It received early accreditation from the American Theological Association, which included the United States and Canada. Not long after, through Dean Buskirk’s influence, the school was accredited by the theological division of the Methodist church, which meant young men and women studying at the ORU Seminary could receive the same financial assistance as at other Methodist or Methodist-approved seminaries.
Those attending the seminary came from more than thirty denominations and several independent groups. The Holy Spirit pervaded the seminary and gave a strong spiritual boost to the entire university.
Two major happenings brought about a dramatic change.
The First United Methodist Church in Tulsa was rapidly leaning toward the Holy Spirit renewal. Dr. L. D. Thomas, the pastor, had received the Holy Spirit in my living room. He was anointed before, but after he was Spirit filled, a boldness came upon him concerning the full gospel. Soon the formerly staid First United Methodist Church began to come alive, and it attracted overflow crowds.
Near the close of 1983, Dr. Thomas died suddenly.
I knew Dr. Buskirk ached to get back into the full-time pastoral ministry. He did not tell me at first he was seriously contemplating the call of the First United Methodist Church in Tulsa to be its pastor.
Jimmy had a pastor’s heart, and I think because he felt he had the seminary solidly based on the Holy Spirit and growing, he could safely leave. The call of First United Methodist for Jimmy to be pastor was unanimous.
I do know how proud I am of the way he has taken hold of that great church Dr. Thomas left, and he has built it into an even stronger charismatic United Methodist church. I know how spiritual the sermons are, how unashamed of the Holy Spirit Jimmy is, how he is unintimidated by any to tone down. In fact, they have just commenced building a new addition to the sanctuary beside the old building, which has been Methodism’s cathedral in Tulsa for over one hundred years.
Jimmy is very happy there. He still speaks at our chapels, he continues to advise and boost and assist the seminary, and our friendship has never been closer.
Head-On with the Adversaries
In 1987, I was to face head-on the clever work of the adversaries whom I had largely ignored. But they had not ignored me.
Vinson Synan once told me that while he lived in Oklahoma City, he had come to know the Oklahoma United Methodist bishop, Dr. Hardt. One day he asked Vinson how to handle me. Vinson said he told him, "You don’t handle Oral Roberts. He is his own man. He will respect you, but he will do what God tells him to do, no matter the cost to himself. If you understand that one thing, he will continue to be a great blessing to the Methodist movement." Bishop Hardt thanked him and said, "You have helped me."
I well remembered Bishop Hardt’s kindness to me and the powerful message he delivered at one of the ORU chapels, one that our students received enthusiastically. I admired him greatly. However, not all of the hierarchy of the Methodist church shared Bishop Hardt’s acceptance of me.
One day I learned the Methodists had withdrawn their accreditation. That loss meant young men and women studying from that church who were in the ORU Seminary lost their financial subsidies, which was a serious concern to many of them.
Next, six professors of the Methodist church resigned. It was an amicable parting. I loved them and they felt my love. It was true, United Methodist churches and seminaries had been trying to hire some of our professors. Two of the six seemed glad to leave, but four were extremely reluctant. I could not help thinking that their leaving was in part due to the time I spent in seeing to it the seminary stayed with its founding purpose: operating under God’s authority and on the Holy Spirit. One of the professors later told me he had received an implied threat that he might lose his ordination credentials if he stayed at ORU.
My response was, God had sent them there and He was leading them away. A far larger number of theological professors who had an earned doctorate and who believed in ORU’s position were anxious and ready to come. That proved to be a great blessing. However, I want to state unequivocally that the number of highly qualified and Spirit-filled theologians from the Methodist church was one of the keys to getting the accreditation the seminary received from the American Association of Theological Seminaries. We owe them a great debt not only for their Spirit-filled lives but also for their scholarship they brought to the seminary.
The move of the hierarchy, the ones who head the Methodist church, had been in action concerning my ministry for at least the last six of the nineteen years I was ordained as a preacher in the Methodist church. I was blocked here and blocked there, but my Tulsa Methodist brethren decided to overlook it. They said they didn’t feel it represented the feelings of Methodist pastors and people or most of the bishops.
It made no matter with me because God kept that steady hand on me to stay where I was. He was doing a mighty renewing of the Holy Spirit in the Methodist church.
Reliable leaders gave me an estimate that a million Methodists—pastors and laypeople—had received the infilling of the Holy Spirit during the nineteen years I was ministering among them. In no way do I say this to infer this happened only because of my ministry. Many other anointed ones within the church, such as those in the Lay Witness Movement, had a hand in the moving of God to bring a renewal of this dimension.
All I know is, one morning I woke up and a headline in the Tulsa World stated that Oral Roberts had been cast out of the Methodist church by a special committee of leaders. The news was carried nationwide. No one knew what to think. When a reporter from the Tulsa paper called me to respond, I stated:
"I knew nothing of the revocation of my ordination until I read it in the newspaper, as nothing was communicated to me orally or in writing.
"But I will always carry the deepest love and appreciation for the United Methodist Church and its people. I am profoundly grateful that I had at least a small part in the charismatic renewal in the Methodist church, and pray that it increases.
"I will continue to exercise my ministry as I have for forty years as one called of God to teach, preach, and have a healing ministry."
Bishop Solomon, the current Oklahoma bishop, and dear Jimmy Buskirk met with me and tried to help me believe it was not true. That was because it had come down from a high-up group whose names and positions were not named. No one seemed to know who they were.
I couldn’t help thinking somebody in the hierarchy of the Methodist church had grown too uncomfortable with Oral Roberts, and the group had a way of acting that couldn’t be countered by my bishop.
Evelyn’s reaction was entirely different from what I was feeling. She told me, "Oral, it was God’s time for you to come out of that denomination, and God just used that unknown group to put you out." She’s a pretty wise woman, and after more than forty years of being married to her and seeing her wisdom at work, I didn’t dismiss what she said. God has His ways and they supersede any human action.
Today, ORU seminary-trained preachers are everywhere in the United Methodist Church. I have not heard of one of them becoming noncharismatic. I believe that is because God is true to His word to me in 1968 that He was sending a renewing of the Holy Spirit in the Methodist church and that I was to be a part of it. Although I became a stumbling block to many of the leaders, that was nothing new to me.
I’m thankful that I’ve kept many friends among this powerful denomination. I love them dearly and keep them in my prayers always, the same as I do for those in the Pentecostal Holiness Church.
I’m relating this because I feel believers should know there are powers at the top of many denominations who can’t deal with people they can’t control, regardless of how God is using them, preachers or laypeople. Therefore, it should strengthen our determination to keep God as our Source, and not man or any institution.
I’m convinced when you obey God, regardless of whether it’s easy or tough, when one door closes, He has another door open for you to enter.