Editor's Note: In this story originally published in the inaugural issue of This Land (May 1, 2010) under the headline Something Good Is Going To Happen To You, Randy Roberts Potts, Oral Roberts’ grandson, reflects on an uncommon childhood in Tulsa's first family of evangelicalism.
I was twelve years old when it happened, in the 7th grade, attending Victory Christian School on 71st Street in South Tulsa. My grandfather, Oral Roberts, climbed up into a tower and began telling the world on national television that God had commanded him to bring in eight million dollars to further his work on Earth. If he didn’t come up with the cash, the Lord, my grandfather said, would take him home.
I was twelve years old and, in the world I was living in, this wasn’t as unusual as you might expect. There was a rhyme and reason to everything in God’s world—if you had a question, the Bible always had the answer. So when my grandfather climbed into that tower, I randomly opened the Bible for guidance and my fingers landed on this passage from the book of Isaiah:
Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander to the people. Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of the Lord thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel; for he hath glorified thee.
I was twelve years old, and this tower business didn’t really make sense, but then again, there was that passage from Isaiah, with God seeming to speak directly to me.
At night I had dreams that the eight million dollars in donations wouldn’t come in, and my grandfather would be taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot like Ezekiel, another Old Testament favorite of mine. Once at school, I overheard two teachers talking about how Oral was a Cherokee Indian, and how it was a longstanding tradition among Indian chiefs to declare the day of their death as a way to get the tribe to do something drastic it didn’t want to do, and the teachers said that if the tribe didn’t cooperate, the chief literally fell over and died on the promised day. Turns out there is no such tradition, but even so, I imagined my grandfather, who at 70 years of age, with his long-hanging ears and bulbous, impressive nose really did look the part of an Indian chief, sitting up there in the Prayer Tower one day and suddenly expiring on his prayer rug. I imagined a lot of things, all far-fetched seeming now, but at the time completely in line with the culture I lived in—a culture in many ways shaped by the teachings of my grandfather.
Oral began “preaching the Word” in the late 1930s as a nineteen-year-old during the Great Depression—my grandmother Evelyn told me that food was often scarce, and Oral would sometimes go out and shoot “swamp rabbits” which she would then dutifully clean and bring downtown where you could rent communal freezer space. Oral’s ministry grew slowly, reaching its prime in the sixties and seventies when he built Oral Roberts University and pioneered the “electric church,” becoming the first television evangelist. His television programs came out of studios in Burbank, California, and his message was simple, and contrary, to what priests and preachers had been telling us for thousands of years: God, according to Oral, wasn’t very interested in punishing us. In fact, God was just dying to heal us. All we needed to do was stretch out our hands in faith and believe, and God would bring healing. Healing to our bodies, healing to our marriages, healing to our loved ones and, yup, healing to our pocketbooks. It was a revolutionary message and one that hadn’t really been heard before in quite the same way.
“God is a GOOD God,” Oral intoned on national television. “Something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!”