Oral Roberts University: Tongues and Truth

A faith healer as college creator? Incon-gruous as it seems, Oral Roberts has planted a $12.2 million campus on Oklahoma’s soil, from which he grew forty-seven years ago. The last fifty years have produced no major Christian university in America, but E. T. Dunlap, head of the Oklahoma state college regents, predicts this venture “will ultimately be one of the leading universities of the Southwest.”

Oral Roberts University is starting with a big bang. As one professor wrote, “It’s too late to start with a few simple facilities and tools and over tortuous years gradually to acquire the basic necessities.…” So on opening day, September 7, the campus inventory included: 420 acres south of Tulsa, some chewed up in anticipation of new buildings; six buildings, three complete, three not; 30,000 books; thirty-eight staff members who hold fourteen earned doctorates; 325 freshmen; and twenty-seven graduate students in Oklahoma’s second theological school (the first is at Phillips University in Enid).

Faculty salaries are comfortable, ranging from $7,500 to $14,000. The well-dressed students, two-thirds of them men, are select and averaged 1,100 out of a maximum 1,600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Kind words have come down from the regional accrediting agency. Several schools, including the University of Minnesota, have decided to accept transfer credits. The U. S. Office of Education has approved $5 million worth of aid.

It’s all incredible to millions who see the shirt-sleeved Roberts enacting his dramatized, televised, big-tent brand of healing evangelism. Dapper and quiet-spoken on his campus, Roberts is still an evangelist most of the time. He interrupted a San Fernando Valley crusade just one day to fly back to campus during opening week.

In effect, he has turned education over to the educators: Dr. John D. Messick, the executive vice-president, former president of East Carolina College, and Dr. Raymond O. Corvin, graduate school dean, who dreamed of such a university with Roberts thirty years ago.

Their university is pioneering all over the place. The pace is set by 1975ish buildings in which architect Frank Wallace, 41, combines starkly contrasting colors and unexpected shapes to produce a kind of permanent World’s Fair.

By next term, the school will boast America’s first electronic “Learning Resources Center.” For $750,000, ORU is buying 150 individual push-button information consoles, similar equipment for every classroom, and necessary production facilities. The goal is a complex blend of sight and sound materials, custom-made to enrich classes and meet study needs of individuals.

The college desires an intellectual openness, in contrast to some schools that share its dedication to evangelical Christianity. Free inquiry is encouraged, and no statement of faith is required of students. “This is a university, not a Bible school,” Roberts says. Three Bible courses will be part of a liberal arts curriculum otherwise identical with that of secular schools. The college will “steer away from cold-blooded legalism,” Corvin adds.

The “don’ts” are cheating, profanity, drinking, and smoking, but the last two bans are justified as health measures. This health aspect is a special emphasis under Roberts’ reigning philosophy of creating “the whole man.” Based on the example of the only “completely whole man,” Jesus, it calls for development and fusion of mind, spirit, and body. Exercise will be required of everybody, including teachers.

How about healing? Corvin says, “All healing is divine, whether through the laws of nature, good health habits, medical science, or miracles.” All will be part of student health, he says, applied on a personal basis. There will be no mass healing meetings.

At the opening-day communion service, the murmur of tongues-speaking identified the university as one with marked Pente-costalist flavor. As such, it dramatizes new intellectual aspirations among some Pente-costalists. The stress is on charismatic gifts, not denominational ties. The faculty (70 per cent from non-Pentecostal churches) must either have experienced “Pentecostal Baptism in the Holy Spirit” and speaking in foreign tongues or be “generally compatible” with this approach.

The boldness of ORU is matched by a contagious optimism. Messick, in his quiet style, claims that “our education this year will be as good as a freshman will find anywhere.” Roberts told students on opening day: “I think you can emerge as the world’s most wanted college graduates.” He said they can offer employers “a healthy body that you know how to take care of, a trained and disciplined mind that never settles for less than excellence, governed by an invincible spirit of integrity, inspired by a personal relationship with a living God, and driven by an irresistible desire to be a whole man to make a troubled world whole again!”

Denver Crusade

When Billy Graham arrived in Denver to launch his Colorado crusade, he addressed 550 ministers and told them to “preach with simplicity, preach with authority, and preach with urgency.”

Then for ten days the evangelist practiced his own preaching—and more than 10,000 Coloradoans responded to his call to receive Christ.

In many ways it was a remarkable crusade. The ten meetings—held in Bears Stadium—drew a total attendance of 277,300, nearly twice as many as the baseball team that normally occupies the stadium drew during the entire season.

Three of the crusade meetings were taped for showing on nationwide television the following week. This second television crusade this year—the first was in June from Honolulu, Hawaii—was to be seen on nearly 300 stations across the country. It was one of the largest independent networks ever put together for any event other than a presidential news conference or a national emergency.

W. STANLEY MOONEYHAM

He Never Felt Better

“Ah! I saw Old Nick grinning on the ivied rock as I dragged such a one along the dell.” The speaker was Marshall Howe, who in 1665 had made himself responsible for the disposal of the bodies of kinless plague victims in the little village of Eyam, 160 miles north of London. In the churchyard can still be seen a stone with the inscription, “He stood between the living and the dead, and the plague was stayed.” This memorial is not to the emergency gravedigger but to Thomas Stanley, nonconformist minister and former incumbent, who worked faithfully with his successor at the rectory, 28-year-old William Mompesson, during the outbreak. By the end of the epidemic, which lasted more than a year, the 350 inhabitants were reduced to 91.

The dread disease arrived in the summer from London, in tailor’s samples and old clothing sent to Edward Cooper, trader. The package was opened by George Vicars, who found the contents damp and put them in front of the fire to dry. He quickly became ill and was dead within days. The scourge soon took hold of the community. There being no resident doctor, it was left to the rector, his wife Catherine, and Stanley to take the lead in the crisis. They persuaded the inhabitants to remain in the village to prevent the spread of infection.

The death rate rose so high that corpses were interred without ceremony, usually by the surviving relations. When the churchyard was full, graves were dug in fields and gardens.

In a dell (probably the one referred to by Howe) the faithful gathered to worship, sitting at a respectful distance from one another. William Mompesson preached from an improvised pulpit on ivy-covered rocks forming a natural arch. Although Catherine succumbed, her husband and Stanley survived. Mompesson was able to write later, “During this dreadful visitation I have not had the least symptom of disease, nor had I ever better health.”

At an open-air service last month, the Archbishop of York, Dr. Donald Coggan, addressed a commemorative congregation of 3,000, including Eyamites in seventeenth-century costume. Recalling the events of 1665, His Grace spoke of modern plagues, mentioning unofficial strikes, indecision, and shoddy thinking. “At the heart of men,” he said, “there is an inner selfishness which acts as a rot in society and in our relations to one another.”

VICTOR PRICE

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