The sky-blue walls of the former Vaudeville theater thundered with faith on Sunday morning in Corona, Queens. Some 600 worshipers rose to join the Latino band in song, shaking their tambourines, heads and hands in electric rapture.
The capacity crowd quieted when the pastor, Victor Tiburcio, took his place on stage, in front of a backdrop designed to look like the New York skyline and lit up like the set of a late-night talk show. Instead, it was the altar for his Pentecostal megachurch Aliento de Vida (Breath of Life), which Mr. Tiburcio and his wife, Hattie, immigrants from the Dominican Republic, opened in Queens 12 years ago.
Pastor Tiburcio had an important message for his congregation.
“We will have tickets for everybody here,” he said in Spanish, prompting more clapping.
The free tickets were for the festival this Saturday in Central Park featuring Luis Palau, one of the world’s leading evangelical Christian figures, whose event is expected to draw 60,000 people to the Great Lawn. For months it has been promoted not only in churches, but also on billboards, on the radio and in the subways, and it promises to be the largest evangelical Christian gathering in New York since the Rev. Billy Graham led a crusade in Queens 10 years ago.
The size of the festival belies the city’s secular reputation and speaks to the vibrant evangelical movement in New York. The phenomenon is driven largely by immigrant-led churches that have proliferated in the boroughs outside Manhattan.
Nearly 900 of the 1,700 churches participating in the festival are Hispanic, organizers said. Latino leaders were the ones two years ago to invite Mr. Palau, an endearing, white-haired bilingual immigrant from Argentina who has built a reputation as the Hispanic Billy Graham, but African-American and Korean-American church leaders quickly got involved in the planning.
The six-hour event is expected to highlight the multidenominational and multiethnic flavor of evangelical Christianity in New York and its suburbs, drawing hundreds of churches whose members also hail from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
“What the Palau Festival has been able to do is catalyze a growing movement of Christian voices present in the city,” said Gabriel Salguero, a pastor of a multiethnic church in Manhattan’s Chinatown and the president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition. It represents, he added, a “coming-of-age of immigrant evangelicals” in New York.
That the event is in Manhattan’s most celebrated park, one rarely used these days as a religious stage, attests to the evangelicals’ increased traction in civic life. “They now can say they constitute one of the chambers of the heart of the city,” said Tony Carnes, a sociologist who publishes an online journal, “A Journey Through N.Y.C. Religions.”
Mr. Palau, 80, has preached in 100 countries with an approachable, apolitical message of faith and personal salvation. He has shared friendly discussions with Pope Francis, a fellow Argentine who in September will make his first papal trip to New York, where the Roman Catholic church has lost some members to evangelical Christian congregations.
But it was Mr. Graham who became a mentor a half-century ago. Mr. Palau worked as an interpreter for him before founding his own ministry with his help.
Mr. Graham was the last evangelical leader to preach on the Great Lawn, in 1991, before an estimated crowd of 250,000 — parks department restrictions have cut the maximum number to 60,000. Though Mr. Graham seemed at ease in New York, Mr. Palau had stayed away from leading mass revivals here, in part, because he thought the city was too large to organize and too spiritually apathetic.
“The world thinks, and I used to think, that New York is all secular,” Mr. Palau said in a recent interview. That changed after two months of living in the city and meeting with churches in preparation for the festival. “There’s a hunger and a desire to talk about spiritual things, which surprised me about New York,” he said.
The recent growth of evangelicalism is noticeable but difficult to quantify. According to Mr. Carnes, there are 1.2 million to 1.6 million evangelicals in the city, which he said was an increase of about 22 percent since 2000. To arrive at the estimate, he synthesized several studies, including the American Values Atlas and work by the Pew Research Center, and culled information from his journal’s database of 6,600 churches.
Mr. Salguero, of the evangelical coalition, said immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia, where Pentecostalism is challenging Catholicism for adherents, found comfort in a familiar atmosphere in New York. “We have a style of liturgy and worship that speaks to Juanita and Juan Doe,” he said. “It’s lively and passionate, and that reflects some of the cultures where people are from.”
Barry Deonarine, 46, a defense lawyer whose family is from Trinidad and Tobago, joined Aliento de Vida in Queens because he said he wanted a more intimate faith experience. “This is the type of evangelical church you would find in Latin America,” he said. “They speak to the need of people who don’t have the power, don’t have the resources.”
Laura Vicuna, 45, a waitress from Ecuador, felt so overcome after listening to a fiery sermon at Aliento from a traveling Pentecostal preacher who briefly spoke in tongues, she fanned her tear-streaked face and gave two donations.
The church has 2,000 members from 30 countries, many of whom come for practical as well as spiritual reasons, such as English classes and legal assistance.
“They need orientation, education, they need everything,” Mr. Tiburcio said. “Many conquer the American dream, but many are underground. They don’t have a green card, they don’t have many things. As a church we are helping them.”
Mr. Tiburcio and his wife started the church in Brooklyn with 10 members. After a few years, the couple expanded to Queens, worshiping in small hotels before moving in 2006 into the old Corona Plaza theater. They have since planted churches on Staten Island, in Florida, in the Dominican Republic and in Colombia.
Today, Aliento de Vida has its own television network, which shows simulcasts of the Queens services. Church members have attended lead-up events and have been involved in service projects related to the festival this weekend. The pastor implored them to go to Central Park. “We’ve been working two years for this,” Mr. Tiburcio said.
The service work is what has separated Mr. Palau’s festival from Mr. Graham’s campaigns. Mr. Palau’s son, Kevin, who is the president of the Luis Palau Association, introduced a social action initiative, based on a project it began in Portland, Ore., in 2008 and brought to cities such as Anchorage, Houston and Sacramento.
About 300 churches in New York have worked with local schools to fix buildings and provide jobs for teenagers, or have organized community fairs to promote health and legal services, Kevin Palau said.
Mullery Jean-Pierre, the Haitian-born pastor at Beraca Baptist Church in Brooklyn, said: “The festival gave us an opportunity to rally people who were just sitting in pews.”
Luis Palau said younger people are “very strong on service now, and that’s a good thing, as long as you don’t go so far that you don’t forget that, hey, there’s a message attached to this.”
That message is about saving souls.
“Three thousand people have come to the Lord, what better a community to have?” Pastor John H. Boyd II, of New Greater Bethel Ministries, said last Sunday at his church’s annual tent revival in Jamaica, Queens.
Mr. Palau corrected the tally of people who have joined the faith ahead of the festival: “It’s 5,000.”
Later, Mr. Palau took the stage before a crowd of 200 mostly black worshipers who had witnessed a long evening of gospel singers, dancers, a Satan impersonator and a Christian rapper. Dressed like a bus driver in gray slacks and a short-sleeved blue oxford shirt, Mr. Palau exclaimed to laughter: “And here comes Grandpa!”
Mr. Palau shared his conversion story as a 12-year-old at summer camp in Argentina. He told the crowd that in accepting Jesus Christ, their sins would be forgotten — but remembered by their mothers-in-law.
Humor aside, his message was simple.
“He isn’t hooting and hollering, he gets to the point,” said Tracy Williams, 47. She added that listening to him made her “feel assured.” She first heard Mr. Palau a few months ago, and then volunteered to pass out fliers for the festival.
Imelda Garcia, a mother who immigrated from El Salvador 20 years ago, had known of Mr. Palau since she was a child. She and her fellow church members had come with their children from Long Island to hear Mr. Palau. But they left before he spoke because it got too late.
The event this Saturday, scheduled to start at 4 p.m., will feature TobyMac, a Christian rapper, and Mandisa, a gospel singer, as well as guests like the former Yankees reliever Mariano Rivera, whose wife, Clara, is a pastor who founded Refuge of Hope church in the Bronx. Mayor Bill de Blasio is also expected to attend and speak at the event, his spokeswoman said.
Mr. Palau gave his Queens audience a preview of his sermon. “When we go to Central Park,” he said with a broad smile, “I’m going to talk about heaven.”