Richard Roberts steps down as president of ORU

Richard Roberts, the president of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma and son of pioneering televangelist Oral Roberts, has asked the Board of Regents for a leave of absence.

Roberts is stepping away from the university which bears his father's name after a lawsuit was filed against the school by former professors. Among the allegations made in the lawsuit, Richard Roberts used university finances for his own and his family's personal use, and Richard's wife Lindsey had inappropriate contact with an underage male on several occasions. The Roberts family denies the allegations.

Oral Roberts himself, now 89 and retired in California, said he was shocked by the allegations, but asserted that the university will weather the storm of controversy.

Controversy is not new to Oral Roberts Ministries, the university, or to the Roberts family. The elder Roberts in 1980 claimed to have witnessed a vision of a 900 foot Jesus, built the now-defunct medical center after promising that the medical center would find a cure for cancer, and in 1987 claimed that if he could not raise the funds necessary to fund medical missionaries, that God "would call me home."

Lavish spending and financial misappropriation have circulated around the Roberts since the 1970s when Patti Roberts, the first wife of Richard Roberts, wrote "From Ashes to Gold" detailing how the Roberts begged for money over television and lavishly used it for themselves. The Oral Roberts ministry began a string of scandals for televangelism in the late 1980s.

Chick Publications made fun of Oral Roberts in one of the tracts when Chick depicted an unnamed evangelist telling an audience "Send me money or I'll die."