The Rev. James Robison, the Texas-born televangelist who co-hosted the daily Christian program LIFE Today alongside his wife Betty for decades and whose ministry reached an estimated one billion homes worldwide through networks including TBN and Daystar, died on Sunday May 17, 2026. He was 82.
LIFE Outreach International, the relief organization he founded, announced his death through its official social media channels.
The cause of death has not been disclosed. No funeral arrangements had been announced as of Sunday evening.
He is survived by his wife Betty, his partner in marriage and ministry since 1963, their son Randy, daughter Rhonda, and eleven grandchildren. Their daughter Robin predeceased him, having died of throat cancer in 2012.
“It is with deep sadness that we share the passing of Rev. James Robison, the beloved founder of Life Outreach International,” the ministry’s board of directors wrote in their announcement. “James devoted his life to sharing the Gospel and bringing hope, help, and healing to those in need around the world. Together, James and Betty stewarded a ministry that has touched countless lives and will continue impact.”
His death comes less than two weeks after the passing of Joni Lamb, co-founder of the Daystar Television Network, on May 7, 2026.
Pioneering televangelist Marilyn Hickey had also died in late April at the age of 94. Three of the most significant figures in Christian television broadcasting have passed within approximately three weeks.
The Story That Began Before He Was Born
James Robison came into the world on October 9, 1943, in Pasadena, Texas, under circumstances that he eventually shared openly throughout his ministry because he believed his own story of hardship and redemption was the most authentic sermon he had to offer.
His mother, a nurse named Myra Wattinger, had been raped. Facing the reality of an unwanted pregnancy, she placed an advertisement in a newspaper seeking a couple willing to care for her newborn son.
A local pastor named H.D. Hale and his wife answered the advertisement and took James in, raising him for his first five years of life in a household where faith was foundational.
At age five, his mother reclaimed him. She had since married the man responsible for his birth, a man who turned out to be an abusive alcoholic.
The childhood that followed was marked by instability and violence.
James had a deeply strained relationship with his biological father that came to a violent head when he was fifteen, his father was arrested following a confrontation and James returned to the Hale family, the couple who had first taken him in and who continued to foster both his faith and his growing sense that he was meant to preach.
He never hid any of this. In sermons, in interviews, in more than a dozen books he would eventually author, Robison returned to the story of his own broken beginning because he believed it was inseparable from what he had to say about faith, healing and the possibility of a life transformed by God’s presence.
He was not performing vulnerability. He was giving his audience the actual evidence for everything he claimed to believe.
He had a life-altering encounter with Jesus at age fourteen. He was called to the ministry at eighteen. He began preaching at eighteen.
Six Decades Of Ministry And What It Built
James Robison began his television ministry in 1968, two years after the Beatles’ last concert, three years before the first email was sent, in a year when American culture was tearing itself apart along fault lines of war, race and generational conflict.
He launched into that environment with a message and a delivery style that drew massive crowds to crusades through the 1970s and 1980s, making him one of the most recognizable evangelical voices in the country.
The year 1979 produced one of the defining moments of his career, and not a comfortable one.
He lost his television slot on Dallas station WFAA-TV following remarks that were considered controversial even within the evangelical community. Rather than stepping back from the public sphere, Robison rebuilt.
The rebuilding produced something more durable than what he had before, because it forced an evolution.
By the 1980s, his focus had shifted from the fiery televised preaching that had made him famous toward something he believed was equally essential to the Christian call: global humanitarian service.
LIFE Outreach International, the organization he founded alongside Betty, became the lasting institutional expression of that shift.
The ministry’s programs provided food to the hungry, built clean water wells in communities that had none, and delivered disaster relief to populations that needed immediate practical help alongside whatever spiritual message accompanied it.
By the time of his death, LIFE Outreach International had become a recognized international relief organization with programs operating across multiple continents.
LIFE Today, the daily Christian talk program he co-hosted with Betty, became one of the most widely distributed Christian television programs in the world.
The show aired on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and Daystar, the two largest Christian television networks in the United States, as well as on internet platforms that extended its reach far beyond what traditional broadcast alone could accomplish.
An estimated one billion homes worldwide received the program. More than twenty million people heard Robison preach in person across his career.
The Books, The Website And The Wells
Beyond the television program and the humanitarian organization, Robison built additional platforms for the ideas and convictions that had driven him since he first took a pulpit at eighteen.
He authored more than a dozen books, including True Prosperity, Thank God I’m Free and My Father’s Face, each one touching the themes of faith, redemption and the practical living-out of Christian conviction that defined his public voice across six decades.
In 2015 he founded The Stream, a Christian news and commentary website, adding a digital editorial voice to a media portfolio that already included television, publishing and direct humanitarian work.
The Stream positioned itself as a platform for Christian perspectives on current events and cultural questions at a moment when those perspectives were increasingly contested in mainstream media spaces.
In 1974, the James Robison Evangelistic Association purchased a hunting and fishing lodge near Hawkins, Texas, and developed it into Brookhaven Retreat, a not-for-profit Christian camp and retreat center that provided a physical gathering place for the community his ministry had built. Brookhaven continues to operate today under different management.
The water wells may be the clearest single image of what his humanitarian work meant at the ground level.
Social media tributes on Sunday included multiple accounts of partnering with LIFE Outreach International specifically to build clean water wells in communities where the absence of clean water was a primary cause of illness and death.
The combination of immediate practical help and the faith that motivated it was the specific approach Robison had settled on after his evolution away from the crusade preaching model of his earlier career.
The Man Who Influenced Mike Huckabee And Chad Prather
The tributes that arrived Sunday afternoon and evening reflected the specific ways different people had encountered Robison across sixty years of public ministry.
Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, presidential candidate and current United States Ambassador to Israel, wrote on X about a specific personal connection. “I worked for James Robison in the 70’s as Dir of Comms. He and wife Betty were huge influences in my life.”
For Huckabee, Robison was not a television figure he watched from a distance but a direct professional and personal mentor during the years when his own public career was forming.
Chad Prather, host of The Chad Prather Show, was among the first prominent voices to respond. “I was absolutely heartbroken this morning to hear of the passing of my dear friend, evangelist James Robison,” he wrote. “What an impact he made for the Kingdom in millions of lives. We celebrate his home-going today with tears of both sorrow and joy. He made an impact on my life that goes beyond words. Well done, servant of the Most High King!”
A supporter on social media captured the more ordinary texture of the connection many people had with his work:
“Love James Robison. Partnered in Life Today Ministry for years to build wells. He will be sorely missed. Praying for his wife Betty and their family. They had a beautiful Godly marriage.”
Sixty-three years of marriage. A daily television program built around that partnership.
A relief organization that built water wells. A story that began with a newspaper advertisement placed by a woman who did not know what else to do and ended with an estimated one billion homes receiving the message that the boy from that advertisement eventually spent his life sharing.
The ministry’s board confirmed that LIFE Outreach International’s food and clean water programs and broader outreach efforts will continue operating under surviving leadership.
Betty Robison and the ministry family have requested prayers from supporters as they navigate the days ahead.
