Robert W. Schambach (April 3, 1926 – January 17, 2012) was an American televangelist, pastor, faith healer, and author. His television program, Power Today, can be seen on the DayStar Christian TV network as well as over the internet in streaming podcasts.[1]
Contents
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* 1 Early life and faith
* 2 Early ministry
* 3 Life ministry
* 4 Family life and death
* 5 Popular culture
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 External links
[edit] Early life and faith
An outgoing youth, Schambach, who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,[2] became a born-again Christian as a youth on a street corner when an evangelist, C. M. Ward, had given an altar call to receive Jesus Christ as Savior after preaching the gospel to the gathered crowd. Young Schambach felt an immediate call to preach, but decided to pursue other ambitions first.
[edit] Early ministry
Ordained as a pastor by C. M. Ward, Schambach, who was also a protégé of the evangelist/faith healer T. L. Osborn, received his formal training at Central Bible Institute in Springfield, Missouri, in the mid-1940s, after serving in World War II as a navy boiler-maker on a destroyer in the South Pacific and Asia. He then began apprenticing along the side of A. A. Allen, a well-known miracle evangelist of the 1940s and 1950s. The five years he served as Allen’s associate evangelist was his “school of the Spirit,” learning how to move in the gift of faith and the working of miracles. One of the controversial late televangelist's rising young protégés in the 1950s, Shambach began travelling even more extensively around the world with Allen on his "Miracle Crusades" during that period along with such up-and coming future televangelists such as Don Stewart, and Leroy Jenkins, who gained a following as "The Man With The Miracle Arm", an arm that had been badly severed during a home renovation project that was reportedly healed miraculously by God at one of Allen's crusades, held in Atlanta in 1960, with Schambach, Stewart and other prominent faith-healing pastors in attendance.
[edit] Life ministry
Schambach was regularly and posthumously seen, in addition to his syndicated TV program, on such Christian TV networks as Trinity Broadcasting Network's (TBN) Praise The Lord program segments, The DayStar network (where his program aired), and INSP. Until the time of his death, he continued to spread the message of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior regularly in crusades both in North America and globally. He was frequently a guest speaker on TBN's Praise-A-Thon fundraiser telethom program segments.
[edit] Family life and death
Schambach's wife of 62 years, Mary Winifred (born September 3, 1926, in Philadelphia), died from natural causes in Tyler, Texas, where they had been living since they founded their ministry, on April 20, 2010. Schambach has two sons and a daughter: Bobby, Bruce and Donna. The Schambachs's daughter, Donna Schambach, is in her own right a revered pastor and faith healer who, since 1982 has had a significant part as associate pastor in her parents ministry over the years, which is based in Tyler, Texas, but also regularly runs crusades in Brooklyn, New York and Philadelphia where Donna pastors a church sanctuary also based there. He died of a heart attack on January 17, 2012[3] in 2012.[4] Schambach never retired, preferring to continue proseltyzing the Gospel and host faith healing crusades until the end of his life. Due to Schambach and his wife's death in 2010, his daughter Donna now presently runs Shambach Ministries.
[edit] Popular culture
Schambach was sampled into the late 1990s rave hit "Injected with a Poison" by Praga Kahn, where he was originally talking about the cult deaths in Jonestown.
[edit] See also
* Faith healing
* Glossolalia
* Pentecostalism
* Word of Faith
* Holy Spirit
