Evangelist Oral Roberts had a dream after talking to God in the desert: a hospital complex where Christians could receive medical treatment and bedside prayer. But now he's shutting it down.
"However spiritual one is, you cannot do anything without money," he said last week.But the cutbacks could save the 4,300-student Oral Roberts University and other components of his ministry.
Roberts had raised the money to pay for his 400-acre religious empire in cash. He built the $150 million City of Faith medical complex without a mortgage, funded $8 million in medical school scholarships for two years and paid $11 million in past-due accounts earlier this year.
At its height, the south Tulsa ministry he founded 25 years ago was a $500 million operation.
But donations from the faithful have fallen with each national headline about wayward preachers, Roberts said. Since the 1987 scandals of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, Roberts' ministry has seen a drop in monthly donations from $5 million to just over $2 million.
"I don't know why it's happened," Roberts said. "I guess life just seems to be what it is."
It was the first time in Roberts' 41-year evangelical career that he publicly acknowledged that expecting a miracle, the theme of his ministry, is not always enough.
The 71-year-old faith-healer said he received his vision about the medical complex during a 1977 conversation with God in a California desert, and was assured three years later by a 900-foot Jesus that his dream soon would come true.
Last week, the minister who earned his reputation as a traveling tent preacher offering salvation and healing gave up part of that dream. He said he was closing his City of Faith hospital and the 147-student medical school, and selling his home - valued at $500,000 in 1987 - and other ministry-owned property to pay off $25 million in debts.
"It was a tremendous undertaking," Roberts conceded. "Medical education is far different from any other form of education I've ever been associated with."
But Roberts does not see it as a failure.
"I don't think it's as bad a day as it seems. I think we'll look back on this and think it's the right thing," he said.
In fact, Roberts seemed almost relieved as he told reporters about his plans to prune his ministry.
"Looking back now that it's made, I think it's one of the best decisions I've ever made."
Roberts and those who have followed the ministry agree that the cutbacks could work for the better.
"The steps that he is taking to stop the flow of money at his two most expensive points of loss - the hospital and medical school - will strengthen financially the university and the ministry," Tulsa Mayor Rodger Randle said. "We have a short-term loss, but a strengthened ability to survive in the long term."
The medical school has been a source of many financial problems for the ministry. In 1987, Roberts' said he had to raise $8 million for it or God would "call me home."