PRESIDENTIAL PERSPECTIVE

It’s Time to Search

Click to Enlarge Richard and Lindsay, the president and first lady, are encouraging students, faculty, staff, and alumni to increase their soul-winning efforts this year.

“This is a place where students are not only serious about getting a quality education from a quality faculty, but also about changing your world. We’re concerned about bringing health and healing and life into whatever profession or ministry or business or job that God’s called us into. That means you’re to be a soul-winner, and I am to be a soul-winner.”
— President Roberts, April 26, 2006 Chapel

Lately, the Lord has impressed upon Lindsay’s and my heart the need to better emphasize soul-winning. She and I realize you can get to heaven if you’re sick, but you can’t if you’re not saved. ORU is a soul-winning machine, with alumni winning souls all over the world. As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me to begin adding up all the souls that members of the ORU family brought to the Lord between April of 2005 and April of 2006.

I started making phone calls and sending e-mails. Responses started flooding in. Do you know that during those twelve months, ORU students, faculty, staff, and alumni won over 700,000 souls? I announced this in chapel before classes ended back in April, and I challenged students — those returning and those graduating, faculty, and staff to double the number of souls they have personally won in the past year. I challenged us all to bring in 1.4 million new souls before graduation next year.

Now it’s harvest time.

Oral Roberts University was forged in the fires of healing evangelism, and there are many of you who have caught that fire and are spreading it to the people in your lives. Some of you, like me, have been called to minister to thousands of people at conferences, international crusades, and on television. Some of the first people I heard from in April were those in full-time ministry who keep track of salvations during their altar calls. Ministries like Ron and Katie Luce’s Teen Mania, Billy Joe and Sharon Daugherty’s Victory Christian Center, and John Smithwick’s overseas crusades receive salvation testimonies from tens of thousands every year.

Of course, not everyone is called to preach to the masses; many of you are building relationships with key individuals and being a witness in the workplace and elsewhere along the highways and byways of every person’s world.

As I told the students during chapel, I am expecting that within the next year, we will go over the 1.4 million mark when it comes to the number of souls we will help bring into the kingdom of God as a result of our witnessing. Proverbs 11:30 tells us, “He who wins souls is wise.” It is time for us to become more intentional than we have ever been concerning soul-winning. Why? Because Jesus is coming soon. And did not the scripture say that “this gospel shall be preached in all nations as a witness, and then shall the end come” (Matthew 24:14)?

Well, if you and I intend to exceed the work of our founder, Oral Roberts, we’d better get with it. It’s conservatively estimated that my father, now in his 88th year, has won more than 20 million souls to Christ in his lifetime. We’ve got a ways to go.

It is my privilege to lead this university — this soul-winning machine. Alumni, not only are you an extension of this ministry, you are the hands and feet of Christ, reaching out to people in need and walking in His love.

I am so proud of what you are doing for God. I hope you will decide to join those of us on the campus of ORU in this campaign to double the number of souls won for the kingdom. Keep me posted; I’ll be praying for you.

May the Lord bless you and enlarge your borders.

Richard L. Roberts
President and CEO