Raising Eyebrows and the Dead

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Roberts, says Harrell, had a "flirtation with respectability in the 1960s and 1970s," when he left the faith-healing circuit to build Oral Roberts University, of which he is president. The 4,650-student campus includes an 11,500-seat arena and schools of medicine, theology, business, education and nursing. The overall complex, with its 60-story clinic and other medical buildings, retirement apartments and two visitors' centers, is valued at $500 million.

Roberts seems to be instinctively returning to his roots in revival-tent Pentecostalism. He is re-emphasizing faith healing and is reaching for his old-time constituency as his income slides (from $88 million in 1980 to $55 million in 1986, according to the Tulsa Tribune) and his largely vacant City of Faith Medical Center continues to lose money ($10.7 million last year). Roberts has quietly tried to sell or lease the medical complex, and is negotiating with a subsidiary of National Medical Enterprises to manage it.

As part of his move toward the mainstream, Roberts in 1968 left the Pentecostal Holiness Church and joined the United Methodist Church. Lately, the Methodists have become increasingly vexed about Roberts' drift toward eccentricity and sensationalism. The regional Methodist unit in Oklahoma has asked the church's Judicial Council to decide who should supervise a "local elder" such as Roberts -- the regional unit or the local congregation. Anti- Roberts rumblings are spreading across the denomination. Last month delegates representing 104,000 Methodists in western Tennessee condemned his fund raising as "offensive, inappropriate and objectionable" and "harmful to the reputation" of the United Methodist Church.