Into the culture

April Lundholm showed up for the bands. The skateboarders were great.

And the best part?

“It didn’t,” the 16-year-old says, “feel like church.”

The suburban Minneapolis teenager is describing a Luis Palau Festival, an evangelistic outreach that is attempting to recast the revival experience for a world in which music and sports are the currency of communication.

The 86-year-old Billy Graham has defined large-event Christian evangelism with a fabled career that presents the gospel in stadium crusades.

Palau, a youthful 70, has reached more than 4.4 million people with a party approach to evangelism featuring a slogan of “Great Music. Good News.”

It has been so successful in attracting young people that some see it defining evangelism in the early part of this century as Graham shaped it in the latter part of the last century.

Gone is the term “crusade” and the series of testimonials leading to a single climax: an altar call from the featured evangelist.

In fact, even though Palau, a native of Argentina, draws tens of thousands to revivals in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia as well as the United States, he’s not at all troubled when teenagers like Lundholm don’t picture him when they think of his festivals.

“I caught the end of him, I think,” says Lundholm, who attended an August 2004 festival in the Twin Cities. “But I really came to hear (the Christian band) Third Day.”

Future festivals are scheduled for next weekend in Madrid, Spain; July 16 in Los Angeles; July 23 in Bend, Ore.; Sept. 1-4 in Sioux Falls, S.D.; and Oct. 8-9 in Washington, D.C., on the National Mall.

The Luis Palau Evangelistic Association, based in Portland, doesn’t rely on celebrity to carry the Christian message to people across the United States, says Kevin Palau, executive vice president of the organization and Palau’s son.

“You know, a Billy Graham Crusade is an event – a happening – no matter what the generation,” Kevin Palau says.

“We are not Billy Graham. But we do share the passion to reach the unchurched, so we had to change.”

A Palau Festival looks more like a fair or street party than a traditional revival.

In a few blocks around the statehouse in St. Paul, Minn., organizers erected food booths, small venues for professional athletes and their sports franchises and a space for the family-oriented Veggie Tales characters.

There was a main stage for bands.

Festival bands have included Toby Mac, Third Day and Point of Grace.

Since 1999, when Kevin Palau first advocated for this festival approach, there has always been a professional-size skate park, a place where national champions of the once-grunge sport of skateboarding perform.

Four times each day – at the skate park, on the music stage, in the Veggie Tales area – Palau’s people pitch the Christian message. It’s not simply up to Palau to spread the word, though his preaching remains a highlight of the events.

“The festival is outside. People come for a few hours, check out what interests them. They bring their kids and, hopefully, some friends or neighbors who are unchurched,” says Kevin Palau, 42.

“It looks and smells like a totally normal weekend event for a city.”

Palau festivals are rooted in an approach that builds on Graham’s legacy. After all, Palau got his start in U.S. evangelism in the 1960s when he worked with Graham in California. A decade later, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association helped Palau start his own organization.

“Everything we do is based squarely on the Billy Graham model,” says Kevin Palau. “And that means, too, that we’re always looking for new and interesting ways to present the message of the Good News.”

Palau’s organization is packaging its Christian message with a new sports-themed DVD, “Livin’ It.” Released in March, the disc has its own national tour, which began May 5.

Actor-turned-evangelist Stephen Baldwin stars in the film, but skateboarders Lance Mountain, Christian Hosoi and Ray Barbee are taking the message to minifestivals in 25 cities across the United States, including Bend on July 23 and Wenatchee on Oct. 1.

All of this innovation makes sense within the history of Christian outreach in America, according to Bill J. Leonard, dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and an expert on American evangelism.

Palau is doing what preachers did in this country from the late 18th century well into the early 20th century, he says, “bringing the Christian message out of the church and into the culture.”

Leonard is talking about George Whitefield, Charles Finney, D.L. Moody and Billy Sunday as well as Graham – evangelists who spanned three centuries, preaching in campgrounds and town squares. They invited people who were unable to attend church or uninterested in congregational life to become Christian.

“They all had a kind of ecumenism, where the boundaries of denominations that were once so strong just didn’t matter to them, just as they don’t matter to Graham and Palau,” Leonard said.

“And as with these preachers today, there was a willingness to use popular media, including music, and in particular the drinking songs of the day that were transformed with Christian lyrics.”

Because of Palau’s willingness to change and embrace new ways to spread his faith beyond sanctuaries, he, like his mentor Graham, is in fact spreading a kind of old-time religion.

According to Lundholm, the Twin Cities teenager, it still works.

“It felt more relaxed, and the music and sports stuff, it was relevant, which it has to be,” she says.

“You have to find ways to bring people in, or no one is going to hear the message.”