Before he spoke to crowds of a hundred thousand people, Tommy Lee Osborn was a barefoot boy on a potato farm in Oklahoma, the youngest of thirteen siblings. The poverty of the Great Depression and little formal schooling, only through the eighth grade, marked his childhood.
At 13, he was converted in a Pentecostal church in Mannford. Two years later, still milking cows on the family farm, he reported feeling God’s call to become an evangelist, an experience he described as laughing and crying at the same time.
At 18, he married Daisy Washburn, a year younger than him. A few years later, at 21, he left with her for India as a missionary, but the trip ended in less than a year, marked by illness in the family and little response to the gospel among Hindus and Muslims in Lucknow.
The couple returned to the United States discouraged. In 1947, at a campaign in Portland, Osborn saw William Branham’s healing ministry up close and decided to add prayer for the sick to his own preaching, a period in which he also grew close to other healing evangelists of the day, such as Oral Roberts, with whom he remained friends for decades.
In the 1950s, the Osborns moved the center of their work outside the United States. They became pioneers in open-air preaching, in public squares and open fields of non-Christian nations, drawing crowds of up to three hundred thousand people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
They taught that physical healing was part of salvation and that faith alone was enough to receive it, a message recorded in books such as Healing the Sick, from 1951. From the 1960s on, however, Osborn also became associated with prosperity theology and open displays of personal wealth.
This absolute emphasis on healing by faith, common to the evangelists of his generation, was criticized by historians of Pentecostalism for placing on the unhealed the blame for not believing enough, a sensitive point to this day.
Alongside Daisy, his collaborator and co-author of books, he built in Tulsa the evangelistic organization OSFO, and from 1953 on, began financially supporting thousands of local pastors and evangelists in dozens of countries. She died in 1995, after 53 years of marriage; he continued traveling and preaching for another 15 years, until his death in Tulsa, in 2013, at age 89.
