Experimental results for discrete features

By 1957, we were receiving some one thousand pieces of mail a day. Nearly every one came from a desperate person or family. I saw, as I had in my dream in Enid, how people were hurting. I realized that people looked good, but when they opened up, you knew they were sick or hurting in ways you had never perceived.

Letters coming to me proved that far more than I had seen in my crusades.

In my first healing revival, I had received eight urgent letters from people who wanted me to pray and write back to them. When Evelyn and I bought the little five-room house from Oscar Moore, I also paid him twelve dollars for a small desk. There in the corner of our little dining room, I wrote to those several people.

That was really the beginning of my determination to answer the mail I received as personally as possible. Each week the number of letters grew, and I felt I nearly wore my right hand out as I endeavored to answer each one.

Three young women attending that Tulsa crusade were secretaries at a large oil company. They spoke to Evelyn and offered to come to our house directly after getting off from their jobs at 4:30 each day and help with the mail. They wanted to donate their time. They would type my answers until time for the healing service, then they would stop and go to the evening services. They had never seen people healed before, and their hearts were really with us. Their names were Ruth Hanson, Eloise Rowland, and Erlene Hanover.

When I closed at the end of nine weeks that summer in 1947, letters had poured in from coast to coast, and the mail was filling up our dining room. Soon

the three volunteer secretaries were not enough to answer it all, so we turned our garage into an office. Eventually, the whole house became the office, and we moved to a larger house since our family had grown.

Ruth Hanson stayed with us, quitting her job. She said, "I feel it's the highest honor of my life to type your answers to people who are really sick and feel they have no place or way to turn." Ruth was seventeen, but mature and a hard worker. She pounded the typewriter eight hours a day without a complaint.

We hired Ruth as my first secretary, and for forty-eight years she has been the only secretary I've ever had. Loyal, able, and compassionate, she has stayed with us from the little house on North Main to our present office on the ORU campus.

We soon outgrew one typist and one typewriter to answer the hurting people who were writing us, some who were saying, "Oral Roberts, your prayers are my last hope. Please answer me."

Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I saw each letter as a person, and I felt that anointing running down my arm into my right hand. I would grab up a stack, hold them to my heart, and stand there crying like a baby and praying my heart out for the people who had been knocked down, and nearly out, in the battle of life—like me when I lay 163 days with tuberculosis.

The letters continued to increase. Soon we left the home that had been turned into an office and moved into a $40,000 one-story office building, then shortly after that into a three-story office building. In 1959, we built a beautiful seven-story white office building in downtown Tulsa as our international headquarters. (That was not to be the last office building. Eventually, we built one unique to the functions of my ministry; it was on the campus of Oral Roberts University.)

As the computer age began to emerge, and our mail continued to run into astronomical numbers, we realized we had touched the very soul of the nation and many people in other countries. We had enough daily mail to know about nearly everything noteworthy happening in America, and knowing it soon. In addition to the people telling us in their letters what was happening in their areas, we had the Abundant Life Prayer Group.

In 1959, we organized the Abundant Life Prayer Group and put the members on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on eight-hour shifts to serve the people calling by the tens of thousands for prayer and counseling. If an earthquake hit, or there was a flood, a big political change, an outbreak of disease, or really anything of major importance, our phones rang off the wall with people calling and asking for prayer. This information was passed on to me wherever I was, at home or in a crusade.

Our communication lines were open. Although I was just one man and therefore had normal limitations, we as an organization were so united, so in touch with hurting people, and so caring that I felt we ranked next to the national media in knowing what was happening. In some ways we knew it even more intimately than they knew it.

I hired and trained both men and women from the churches of Tulsa to work

eight-hour shifts to help me get out my letters as I felt each answer from God to each person who wrote to me. I Worked with the employee-associates to help them grasp what each letter meant, to see how delicate were the problems of the people. Every letter had to be read, categorized according to need, and then answered with the laying-on-of-hands compassion and anointing I felt. I could not abide a printed or form letter sent as the answer. I wanted answers personalized.

We had something like three hundred typists, yet we couldn't keep up with the amount of mail I was receiving. When I returned from a crusade and saw piles of my answers waiting to be typed, it broke me up. I believe the healing ministry caused me to think not in parts but in wholes. I wanted to serve the people in every way they had need that we, with God's anointing, could try to meet.

My office manager at that time, Manford Engel, and his assistant, Al Bush, caught the spirit of what I was trying to do, and so did most of the people we hired in this area. Al had a technical mind, so I said, "Al, how can we be more personal in our answers? How can we speed up our answers going back into the mail? How can we help the people feel what we feel for them? Isn't there a better way?"

A few days later, Manford and Al came to my office. Manford said, "Oral, I think you ought to send Al to IBM in New York and let him explain our problem. I would go, but Al is better qualified to talk with the engineers on their turf."

IBM was just turning out the new 1400 computers. When Al arrived in New York and sat down with IBM's engineers and explained our need, he saw at once the 1400 could be adapted to do everything I wanted. When my Partners (supporters in prayers and finances for my ministry) received my answers, I wanted them to feel we knew them by name, by need, and by the same feeling I felt when I laid hands on the sick and prayed for them as the presence of God was in my right hand.

Because the IBM engineers had no experience with our particular needs, Al had to physically show them how to break down the 1400 computer and build one for us. They got excited in this joint effort with us, and they and Al did the job. The 1400 was finally shipped to us, so that for the first time words by this new computer could be put in both upper and lower case. It was a tremendous advance in the existing technology.

Al took me in hand and tried to show me how the 1400 worked.

"You're wasting your time, Al. I'm not mechanically minded," I said.

"Well, say it's you back there lying bedfast with tuberculosis and you wrote us a letter for prayer. What kind of letter would you want to get back?" he asked.

"Oh, I would want you to address me by name: 'Dear Oral Roberts.' Then I would want to read something about what I had said in my letter so I would know you had read it. I would want some scriptural references showing me how Jesus healed people like me and how He gave this power to His disciples. Finally, I would want you to pray for me by name, by the disease or need I had, and send the letter with an encouragement that I could be healed, and that you really

believed it."

"And that's what you want your answers to do for those who write to you?" Al asked.

"Absolutely."

"You've got it."

"In this IBM 1400 computer?"

"Yes."

"How did you get it done?"

"You told me to go to IBM's main plant and not to come back to Tulsa until I had shown them your heart, your determination, and your goal to take the very latest thing beyond the typewriter so you could answer person to person."

"You saw that it will work?" I asked.

He said, "Go in there, write out your answer, and let's see what this computer does with it."

When they ran my answer through the computer in seconds and handed it back, I read it and wept. "At last," I said, "we're on the right road. Now we'll have to adapt this so that I can say every personal thing I want to say and gear it to insert a special category of need."

"That's right. I was told by IBM's engineers that it's never been done before, and they're anxiously waiting for the news that you feel it will work."

By sending my answers through the 1400, we could handle the mail with far fewer people and save the ministry thousands of dollars a week. How anxiously I waited to see if the people I wrote would be able to tell any difference as they read my letters! Soon People began writing back, thanking me as though I had done every part of the letter by hand, for they said it was so personal, so warm, so anointed, it was almost as if I were there laying hands on them.

I called in Manford, Al, and the letter helpers and I read the openings of the apostle Paul's letters to Timothy and to those in Corinth, Thessalonica, Philippi, Colosse, Rome, Galatia, and Ephesus.

"Now," I said, "do you feel Paul wrote these words to you?"

"Oh, yes," they said in unison.

"Yet these letters were written two thousand years ago. The words I'm reading are in ink and on paper in a book called the Bible. Still, you feel it's totally personal to you?"

"Yes," they said, "we'd never thought of that before."

"The reason is that this man of God, Paul, wrote letters only when he was inspired of God. Each word was laden with the Holy Spirit. Distance between him and those for whom the letters were intended didn't matter. God's Spirit was in Paul, and his heart was in his letters. Those who helped Paul write the letters were also moved upon by the Spirit.

"Therefore, if you and I will work as a team, never growing careless or

hardened or matter-of-fact, but allow God to work His compassion and His faith through us, our letters will meet needs—not like the Word of God itself can do—

but as close to it as possible."

There was a release. There were tears. There was new excitement, expectation, and a spirit of working together. I could feel all of that.

New machines have replaced the 1400 as it had done the typewriter, so that today we answer even better and quicker. When you use machines simply as instruments, and not in the place of your spirit, your compassion, and your personal faith, it seems to me it is a way to do the very best job possible to help people at the point of their need, even by a letter.

It's fair to say that when some people learned we were no longer using typewriters but computers, they thought there was no way my answer could be personal. I would have felt the same way if I had not been part of the magnificent improvement that the computer is over the typewriter. Simply put, due to the 1400 and its far better successors, my answers can be even more personal, really carrying my heart with them, and we can answer letters days earlier (which often can make the difference in the miracle of deliverance being wrought).

Manford and Al worked together to carry out the assignment that I felt an urgency to begin. Manford stayed with me as the head man of the office for over twelve years. He left only because his wife felt they should move to Phoenix for health reasons, but his heart, in many ways, stayed with us.

In all the years of this ministry only a few men have served in managing the office. Bill Lee, who was an administrator at Le Tourneau Industries in Toccoa, Georgia, served as our first manager beginning in 1947. Then followed Manford Engel, and after him, Al Bush.

Al, with his second-in-command, the very able George Stovall, continued to come up with new ideas and equipment to help me make all our efforts of writing and receiving phone calls through the Abundant Life Prayer Group more completely person-centered as we sought to bring God's healing power to the people, no matter the distance between us. George was our fourth manager, the fifth was Ron Smith, and the sixth is Jeane Alcott, an ORU graduate. This means in 48 years, we've had only six managers of our ministry.

I owe much of the success of my office and the crusades to the teams God called to be by my side.