Evangelist offered comfort

Those who came to know the Pentecostal evangelist Oral Roberts, after he retired to a vacation home overlooking the 10th tee at Newport Beach Country Club, remembered him more as a gracious friend than fiery faith healer.

One of the 20th century’s most influential and controversial religious leaders, Roberts died Tuesday at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian of complications from pneumonia, a spokeswoman for his family said. He was 91.

Tom Thorkelson, the Orange County director of interfaith relations for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, became good friends with Roberts after they met at a car wash in Newport Beach in 1992.

The two men would later comfort each other when their wives died. Roberts once offered to give Thorkelson a blessing when his wife was critically ill.

Thorkelson hesitated for a moment, he said, because he had seen footage of rollicking Pentecostal faith healing sessions in which the healed would drop to the floor.

Instead, Roberts quietly anointed his head with oil and prayed.

“He gave me a blessing that was not loud, not boisterous. It was quiet, simple, sweet and sincere,” Thorkelson remembered. “Sure, he had frailties, but I never saw anybody display the light of Christ more than Oral Roberts.”

Roberts rose from humble beginnings as the stuttering son of a poor minister in Oklahoma to become a pioneer in television evangelism who reached millions of viewers at the height of his influence. He once sparked controversy by claiming that he had a vision of a 900-foot-tall Jesus who told him to build a hospital in Oklahoma. The vision came at a critical time in Robert’s fundraising efforts for the hospital.

Roberts claimed in a subsequent fundraising campaign for the hospital that God would “Call him home” unless he raised $8 million for missionary work. The hospital closed its doors in 1989.

“He was a bit different from the person you had in your mind who saw this vision of a huge Jesus,” said the Rev. John Huffman, retired pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach.

Roberts attended services a few times at St. Andrew’s, and Huffman visited him in the hospital after he recovered from a heart attack in his latter years.

“He was a very quiet, very gracious, warm man,” Huffman said.

Roberts and his wife, Evelyn, who died in 2005, had maintained a vacation home at the Newport Beach Country Club for years before taking up residence there permanently, Huffman recalled.

Huffman was the pastor of a Presbyterian church in Tulsa, Okla., when he got to know Roberts in the mid-1960s. Wearing academic robes, the Presbyterian minister would walk in a solemn procession when Roberts was named the first president of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. The late evangelist founded the school in 1963. Today, the school claims to be the largest Charismatic Christian university in the world.

The two ministers’ paths crossed again after they moved to Newport Beach years later.

Roberts loved to golf, and would sometimes mentor young ministers who came to him for guidance, Huffman said.

Roberts had his share of tragedy during his life, which seemed to humble him, Huffman recalled.

His daughter, Rebecca Nash, and her husband died in an airplane crash in 1977. His oldest son, Ronald, committed suicide. A younger son, Robert, resigned as president of Oral Roberts University in 2007 amid accusations that he had mismanaged the school’s finances.

“He was a decent, fine human being, and I consider him a real brother in Christ,” Huffman said. “I did not agree with all of this theology, but I loved to talk with him.”