Richard Lee Roberts (born November 12, 1948) is an American television evangelist and faith healer who serves as the chairman and chief executive officer of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association. He previously served fifteen years as the president of Oral Roberts University. Early life and education Richard Lee Roberts was born on November 12, 1948, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of evangelist Granville Oral Roberts and schoolteacher Evelyn Lutman Roberts. The third of four children, Richard had an older sister, Rebecca Ann, who was killed, along with her husband, Marshall Nash, in a plane crash in 1977; and an older brother, Ronald David, who committed suicide in 1982, six months after coming out as homosexual, and five months after entering a drug rehabilitation facility. Robert's younger sister, Roberta Jean Potts, is a practicing attorney in Tulsa. As a young boy, Roberts watched his father travel the United States and the world conducting healing meetings, where he would preach and pray for the sick. At times, his father and mother were gone for periods as long as six weeks. When school permitted, Roberts accompanied his father on trips and dreamed of having a healing ministry of his own; many times walking by his side as his father prayed for people in the "invalid tent". During the portions of the services where his father prayed for people, Roberts was often standing on his chair, clapping when people were healed. At age 5, Roberts had his first public performance at an Oral Roberts crusade in Baltimore, Maryland, where he stood on a chair to sing "I Believe." Around the same time, his father began to teach him golf; the first time he swung the club, Roberts sent a ball through the family's living room window. In the book Expect A Miracle: My Life and Ministry , Oral Roberts wrote about the bond he and his son Richard built through playing golf. Though drawn to ministry, the attention his father drew made Roberts uncomfortable, leading to teasing at school. Roberts wrote, "I came home from school many a day with my shirt torn and my nose bloodied from being in fights with the other kids who made fun of me, my dad and the healing ministry of Jesus Christ." As a teenager, with the negative press his father was receiving and pressure from his father to sing at crusades, he began to pull away