Biography
Tommy Lee Osborn was born on December 23, 1923, in Oklahoma, in a poor farming family. He grew up in the years of the Depression, and he knew hardship. His father was a farmer, and his mother was a devout woman. At the age of ten, he was converted at a church meeting. He felt a call to preach in his teens. At the age of seventeen, he began to preach and soon became a pastor. He was a young man of great ambition. In 1942, he married Daisy Washburn, a young woman who shared his calling. They were both under twenty. They served in a small church in Oregon.
In 1945, they went to India as missionaries, a trip that had been planned with high hopes. They were disappointed by the results. They found that the Hindus and the Muslims were unmoved by their preaching, and they faced a number of difficulties. They suffered from illness. After a year, they returned to the United States, with a sense of failure. They were in a state of discouragement. They went through a period of deep searching. They studied the Gospels and came to a new understanding of the ministry of Jesus. They were persuaded that Christ still heals the sick and that the gospel is accompanied by signs.
In 1947, he heard of the ministry of William Branham, the healing evangelist, and went to a meeting in Dallas. He was impressed and was moved to begin a healing ministry. In 1948, he started to hold crusades. He and Daisy traveled to the cities of America and then to the Caribbean. They held meetings in Jamaica and Puerto Rico. Soon he was one of the leaders of the healing revival of the late 1940s and 1950s. He held huge outdoor crusades in the nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in which hundreds of thousands attended. He used film and recordings to spread the message. He also trained national preachers and supported them.
His message was a stress on the power of faith. He taught that the gospel is God's answer to every human need. He wrote a number of books, among them Healing the Sick, published in 1951, which became a classic of the healing movement, and Soulwinning, and The Purpose of Pentecost. His writing was plain and bold. He taught that the believer has authority in the name of Jesus. He also was among the first to use mass media in missions. He started a ministry in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called OSFO International, which distributed millions of copies of his books and tapes.
He was criticized by some for his claims. He made very large claims about the number of conversions and the healings. Some of his reports were questioned by investigators. His later teaching had a strong stress on prosperity, which brought some critics. He was also accused of promoting a gospel of success. He denied the charge and said that he wished to help the poor. He was also a friend of the poor and gave away large sums to national churches.
His wife Daisy, who was his partner for sixty-nine years, died in 2011. He died on February 12, 2013, in Tulsa, at the age of eighty-nine. His life shows the effect of a young man who came back from the field in failure and who found a new approach. His work reached many and influenced a generation of evangelists.