Miracles Under the Big Tent

Following his own dramatic healing, Oral Roberts felt called to carry that same hope to the nation. He purchased a canvas tent that eventually grew to hold up to twelve thousand people and traveled from city to city, setting up crusades that ran for weeks at a time. Long lines of the sick, some carried on stretchers, formed outside each service hoping for a turn at the healing line.

Roberts developed a simple, direct method. He would lay his right hand on each person, pray a short, forceful prayer commanding sickness to leave in Jesus' name, and move to the next. Reports from these crusades described tumors that disappeared overnight, deaf ears that opened, and patients who left wheelchairs behind after decades of paralysis. Local newspapers and physicians sometimes documented the changes, adding weight to the testimonies.

His catchphrase, God is a good God, became more than a slogan. It challenged a generation raised to see sickness as God's mysterious will, replacing fear with bold expectation. Roberts insisted that faith was not passive waiting but active reaching, urging seekers to expect a miracle before they ever stepped into the prayer line.

The tent crusades eventually gave way to television broadcasts that carried the same message into millions of homes, and later to the founding of Oral Roberts University and the City of Faith Medical Center. Yet the heartbeat never changed: ordinary, desperate people meeting a God willing to touch their bodies as readily as their souls.