Stealth Richard Roberts Resignation

Oh, look what happened over the Thanksgiving Wknd. Quite possibly as a result of another wrongful termination law suit filed against dear old ORU last Wednesday,

A senior accountant for Oral Roberts University claims in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that he was ordered to help school president Richard Roberts and his wife "cook the books" by hiding financial wrongdoing from authorities and the public.

Trent Huddleston said in the wrongful termination lawsuit that he was directed against his will to falsely list tens of thousands of dollars as expenses rather than assets — which were spent remodeling the home of Richard and Lindsay Roberts — in order to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies.

He claims nearly $123,000 was paid by Oral Roberts University and Oral Roberts Ministries for remodeling the home.

as well as an effort, no doubt, to fly under the radar (& a successful one, we didn't even notice until today) Richard Roberts quit his gig as president of the university his father, Oral, founded as another of his "prosperity gospel" scams.

Times have changed at Oral Roberts University.

The once rigid dress code has been loosened so much that, as one student puts it, aside from the lack of guys wearing earrings the campus could be Oklahoma State. The prayer tower is showing rust. Students still sign an honor code pledging not to lie, steal, curse, drink or smoke — but they also hold hands during chapel.

Oral Roberts, now 89, recently returned from semiretirement to try to quell a scandal that has shaken the flagship university of charismatic Christianity, but on Friday the scandal caused the downfall of his heir.

[...]

"I'm sure there is corruption everywhere," said freshman Ben Conners, one of a number of people interviewed before the resignation. "But if you're holding students to such a high standard, making them sign an honor code and live by these strict principles, I expect the administration to be living an even stricter set of principles. To see something like this, it feels empty, like an elaborate masquerade party."

At a university that is hardly a den of dissent, the reaction to the scandal has been striking. Before Richard Roberts stepped down, tenured faculty gave him a no-confidence vote and his hand-picked provost said he would resign if Roberts were reinstated.

"There was a time when the wagons would circle and we'd protect our own," said the Rev. Carlton Pearson, a former member of the ORU board of regents who is now a United Church of Christ minister. "But we don't know what our own is anymore. People are asking questions and questioning answers, and we're not used to it."

Those Dirty Fucking Hippies & their "Question Authority" crap from the '60s. Oh, if only we'd nipped that in the bud, we could just keep the scams going w/o any work, but now we have to keep the sheep from seeing what's going on right under their noses.

To outsiders, Oral Roberts may seem a relic, a man who drew scorn for saying in 1987 that God would "call me home" if he didn't raise $8 million in three months (he raised more than $9 million). But in the 1950s and 1960s, Roberts had brought spirit-filled Christianity into the mainstream. He took his revivals to a new frontier for religion: television.

"Here was this Pentecostal preacher who speaks in tongues, was brought up in poverty like many of us, and he builds this place that looks like it landed the night before from another planet," Pearson said. "I can't tell you the pride."

Isn't pride of those not-approved-of-in-the-Bible deals? Let alone pride in some dated '60s (there they are again) architecture that's starting to rust?

Most ORU students grow up in charismatic or Pentecostal churches. For some, the liberal arts school is the only education their parents will pay for, at a cost of almost $30,000 a year.

The rules are an endless source of curiosity. Curfew for female students is midnight on weekdays and 1 a.m. weekends, and a half hour later for men. A violation can result in a $50 fine, which helped birth the ORU saying: "The wages of sin is $50."

[...]

[Tim] Brooker is one of three former professors who sued the university last month. He accused the school of forcing him to quit after he warned Richard Roberts that requiring students to work on a Tulsa mayoral candidate's campaign jeopardized the school's tax-exempt status. Brooker traces the scandal to a distortion of the "Seed-Faith" theology pioneered by Oral Roberts, which holds that those who give to God will get
things in return.

"Instead of focusing on what can we do for God, we've been focusing on what can I get from God," Brooker said.

And is it just a coincidence that this "God" of which they speak has no PayPal acc't. or the like, so any donations to curry his favor end up in the grasping mitts of a "ministry" somewhere?

Oral Roberts' teachings influenced a whole new generation of "prosperity gospel" preachers, six of whom are the target of a financial inquiry led by the ranking Republican on the Senate finance committee. Three of those under scrutiny — Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar — sit on the ORU board of regents.

[...]

Oral Roberts felt God used him as instrument to heal, and claimed Jesus had commissioned him to find a cure for cancer. Roberts also felt called to build the City of Faith, an enormous hospital complex that was to marry prayer and medicine, anchored by a 60-story tower. The project's collapse in the late 1980s is one reason ORU is a staggering $52.5 million in debt.

Still waiting for that cure, Oral. Wouldn't it be ironic if "God" used cancer to "call you home?"

We are, of course, terribly disappointed that Mr. Roberts & his wife Lindsay have not continued to fight these scurrilous accusations as they previously promised. (You know how that goes: First, the "this is all a hideous lie, I/we deny everything, & will fight this to my/our last breath" statement. Second, "I am temporarily stepping down from my position, as this is all too much of a distraction, & I/we will be better able to fight this to my/our last breath, & this will allow the work of the organization to continue." Then, the resignation, as quietly as possible, perhaps w/ an "I hope we can put all this behind us" statement.)

Not that we think these two hypocrites had anything to defend, we just wanted to learn more about Mrs. Roberts' sex life, as implied here. Juicy, to say the least. From the Tulsa World:

The full, unsubstantiated report now attached to the lawsuit contains new allegations that Lindsay Roberts, Richard Roberts' wife, spent the night in an ORU guest house with an underage male nine times, was photographed 29 times in her car with an underage male after midnight and after minors' curfew, visited Victory Christian School with an underage male 81 times in 2004, smoked with an underage male at her house and repeatedly moved her "male 16-year-old friend" into her family's house.

The summary of the report in the first version of the lawsuit stated that Lindsay Roberts had sent text messages to underage males late at night. She said earlier this week that one of her daughters used her cell phone and that the family sends cell phones home with the daughters' friends to ensure that they get home safely.

In case you're interested (& who wouldn't be?) here's a picture of Mrs. R.
(lovely, isn't she?) & a link from her website:
PLANT A SEEDIf you would like toplant a seed of yourfaith today, click here.
We're just assuming that's how she trolls for younger dudes on the web.