**Renowned US television evangelist Oral Roberts has died in California at the age of 91, his ministry has said.**Mr Roberts was taken to hospital after a fall at the weekend. His spokesman said he had died from complications from pneumonia in Newport Beach.
Mr Roberts’s philosophy was the unity of mind, body and spirit, although he was cool on labels of “faith healer”.
He reached millions from the 1960s onwards, wrote dozens of books and founded Oral Roberts University.
The university, chartered in 1963, is based in Tulsa in Oklahoma, where Mr Roberts had entered an evangelistic ministry in 1947.
It was there he took up his theme, which many labelled faith healing, although Mr Roberts said that that was God’s duty.
But he did conduct hundreds of “miracle healing crusades” for thousands of people in more than 35 countries.
Controversy
Mr Roberts was one of the first evangelists to see the power of the broadcasting medium, bringing cameras into his sermons in the mid-50s - a path followed by such fellow preachers as Pat Robertson and Billy Graham.
As with many televangelists, his money-raising courted controversy.
He famously said that God would strike him dead if he failed to raise $8m for his City of Faith medical centre in the 1980s. He attracted $9m but it later closed.
His son Richard resigned as president of Oral Roberts University in 2007 following allegations that funds had been misspent.
Born on 24 January 1918 in Oklahoma, Oral Roberts said that overcoming tuberculosis at 17 was the driving force behind his emergence as one of the leading evangelists.
He also survived two heart attacks in the 1990s.