When God Talks, Oral Listens

Roberts' City of Faith merges doctoring and prayer

Local politicians, ex-Football Star Roosevelt Grier, and Evangelists Rex Humbard and Pat Robertson attended. Barbara Mandrell sang the national anthem. There was a congratulatory letter from President Reagan. The festivities in Tulsa last week preceded not the kickoff of a football game but the opening of the City of Faith, the $150 million medical complex that Evangelist Oral Roberts claims he built on direct orders from God.

The triple-tower glass-and-steel complex, on an 80-acre site adjacent to Oral Roberts University in south Tulsa, houses a research center, diagnostic clinic and 294-bed hospital containing the latest medical gadgetry, including computerized patient records. There are such amenities as concealed bottles to collect patients' body fluids, and redesigned gowns so that, as one staff member put it, "you're not hanging around with your fanny sticking out."

But the City's main distinction is that it merges medicine and prayer, symbolized by a 60-ft. bronze sculpture of joined hands at the facility's entrance. All doctors and nurses are required to take oaths to "exemplify Christlike character" and abstain from alcohol, tobacco and illegal drugs. While they minister to the flesh, specially trained "prayer partners" tend to the mind and spirit. Says Roberts: "We seek to saturate patient treatment in the atmosphere of the power of prayer, both medicine and prayer becoming a single and continuous act."

The City of Faith will not renounce the hands-on healing that launched Roberts, now 63, to fame 30 years ago. But, insists Orthopedic Surgeon James Winslow, the facility's chief executive officer: "What we're doing here is not a substitute for good medicine. We'll stop the bleeding or patch the air leak in the lung and pray at the same time." No medical procedures are expressly forbidden, but abortions will not be performed for birth control. The facility will draw its patients primarily from Roberts' 3 million followers or "partners," half of whom donated all the money needed for construction.

God's orders to build the City, along with his design specifications, were received in 1977, says Roberts, while he was spending time alone in a Southwest desert following the death of his daughter and her husband in a plane crash. Carrying out the divine instructions was not easy. Roberts tells of devilish obstructions. On a visit to Israel, he says, Satan attempted to tumble him into the Sea of Galilee. There were mundane problems as well. Donations flagged, and local and federal groups objected to the project on grounds that Tulsa was already overloaded with hospital beds.

But in his hour of need, Roberts was not found wanting. Money started to pour in after the evangelist told of a visitation by a 900-ft.-tall Jesus who said, "I told you I would speak to your partners and through them I would build it." And objections were overridden after state officials were hit with thousands of letters from Roberts' followers. The evangelist says he persisted in the four-year effort because if he did not build the City of Faith, "I would be disobedient to God."

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