On 4 January 1987, speaking in hushed tones to his “Expect a Miracle” television audience, Oral Roberts announced that he needed $4.5 million in "quick money." He asked viewers to sed $100 immediately and lay aside follow-up donations for the next two months. 
More precisely, Roberts explained that God had instructed him to raise funds for his City of Faith Medical Center in Tulsa, OK, by March 1 of that year; failing that, God would “call me home.” In a subsequent fundraising letter, the Lord's extortionate demands rose to $8 million.
Roberts begged supporters not to let Satan win, and he suggested that in exchange for helping seed his missionary work, contributors would receive a “hundredfold return” on their investment. He also suggested that viewers who didn't donate would suffer in the coming year.
Panicked by their fear that the charismatic televangelist might in fact surrender his mortal coil, over the next several months, more than satisfying the Lord's thirst. Over $1.3 million of the fund was offered by the owner of a dog track.
Goals met, Roberts lived. His medical program, however, sank like a poorly-built ark. Within a year, Roberts announced the closure of his City of Faith Medical Center in Tulsa; by early 1989, Roberts had terminated his university's free medical tuition and scholarship programs.
Students who transferred to another medical school were forced to repay their debts immediately, at 18 percent interest. Eventually, the students were left with no choice but to leave, as Oral Roberts Medical School closed for good in September 1989.
The infamous 1987 plea was not the first time Roberts had leveraged his mortality for donations to the medical facility. A decade earlier, he asked his congregation to pressure the Oklahoma Health Planning Commission to support the hospital's construction.
In a letter to supporters, he explained that "I heard my own voice say, ‘God, if you don't let me build this, I can't live. Please take away my life or cause my partners to understand that I am anointed by You to pray for the sick and to build the City of Faith.'”
He asked them to follow God's instructions and send donations in multiples of $7. If they did so, God assured him, they would "receive as they have never before received.”
Another "life or death" fundraising effort raised a futile $11 million in early 1989, only a few months before the center closed for good.
For a man who actually claimed to have raised the dead, the collapse of his own medical school must have seemed a bitter rebuke. Unshaken in his faith, however, Oral Roberts continued his pharisaic gibbering until God's patience expired in December 2009.
