Roberts Liardon was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma — notable, according to his own published biography, as the first male child born at Oral Roberts University, in whose founder’s honor he was named. From an early age he sensed a call to ministry and to the study of Christian history: he has said that at around age twelve he was drawn to research the lives of past “heroes of the faith” to learn from both their successes and their failures. He delivered his first public address at thirteen, and at seventeen he published his first book, I Saw Heaven, which brought him wide attention as a young Christian author and speaker.
Liardon went on to write more than four dozen Christian and self-help books. He is best known for the God’s Generals series — a set of biographical volumes and accompanying videos chronicling the lives, ministries and legacies of noted Christian revivalists, healing evangelists and charismatic leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The series became one of the best-selling collections of Christian biography in print, and Liardon’s books have reportedly sold several million copies worldwide in dozens of languages.
In 1990, Liardon moved to Southern California and founded Embassy Christian Center in Orange County, which grew to include a Bible college alongside its congregational ministry. Through the center he has organized humanitarian outreach — food, clothing and medical aid — delivered by mission teams to communities in the United States and abroad, and his speaking ministry has taken him to over a hundred countries. He also founded the Reformers and Revivalists Historical Museum in California, housing artifacts and research related to the history of Christian revival movements.
As a self-described church historian, Liardon has spent much of his ministry gathering research and firsthand recollections related to twentieth-century revivalists and healing evangelists, drawing in part on relationships with older Christians who had known figures such as William Branham, Kathryn Kuhlman and Aimee Semple McPherson — subjects of the earlier volumes in the God’s Generals series. God’s Generals: The Revivalists, the series’ third volume, looks further back in history, from the eighteenth-century Wesleyan revival to Billy Graham’s twentieth-century crusades.
This page is an original author profile prepared by UECF.NET, drawing on Roberts Liardon’s own published “About the Author” note and other publicly available information. It is a UECF.NET library entry and is not part of the copyrighted text of God’s Generals: The Revivalists.