Oral Roberts: Salesman for God

[Originally published on The Guardian‘s Comment is free in 2009]

Oral Roberts, who died on Wednesday, sold lonely women handkerchiefs to weep in and changed American Christianity

The late Oral Roberts was a healer, an exorcist, a preacher, a televangelism pioneer, an ecumenist and a cultural icon whose life and message united popular religion with the American Dream.

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How Liverpool’s Frontline church ‘struggles’ with homosexuality

[Originally published on The Guardian‘s Comment is free in 2011]

If you’re a Pentecostal or charismatic Christian in Merseyside, you’ll know that Frontline Church, in the Wavertree area of Liverpool, is pretty much the hip place to be. But a thought-provoking Guardian video report by John Harris last month reveals there’s more to Frontline than just trendy worship and dynamic preaching. Its volunteers are reaching out to sex workers, drug addicts and people in poverty, sometimes with traditional methods, such as food banks, and sometimes in quite progressive ways you might not expect from a conservative church, such as distributing condoms to prostitutes.

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