Luis Palau

At a summer camp in Argentina, a twelve-year-old boy wrote down one short sentence. According to a life sketch published at his death, that night he wrote: “Feb. 12, 1947. I received Jesus Christ.” In Argentina, February is the height of summer. A camp counselor, whose name the sources have not kept, had talked with him. There was no more drama than that. He later wrote that you do not need a spectacular conversion story. It just has to be your own.

That boy was Luis Palau. He would grow into the evangelist whom newspapers called “the Billy Graham of Latin America.” According to his own organization, he preached to thirty million people in his lifetime, in seventy-five countries. His radio programs in Spanish and English ran on thousands of stations. When he died in 2021, someone in the Argentine parliament submitted a motion to express official mourning.

But in February 1947 he was a boy without a father, in a family that had become poor.

A BIBLE FROM A BRITISH OIL EXECUTIVE

Luis Palau was born on November 27, 1934, in Ingeniero Maschwitz, a small town north of the city of Buenos Aires. He was the only son among seven children. His father, also named Luis, was a businessman in construction. His paternal grandparents had come from Spain after the First World War. His mother, Matilde Balfour de Palau, had Scottish and French family. Luis grew up bilingual, in Spanish and English.

In those years Argentina was a Roman Catholic country. The Palau family also came from that world, according to a motion in the Argentine parliament from 2021. Protestants were a small minority. Several sources tell the same story of how the family became evangelical. A British oil executive, Edward Rogers, gave Luis’ mother a Bible. She and her husband came to faith. Rogers remained a spiritual friend of the family.

They went to a meeting of the Brethren: small congregations without a pastor, where the brothers lead the service together. In an interview from the early 1980s, Palau said that such a meeting sometimes consisted of twelve people. Seven of them were from his own family.

Luis went to British schools, first a boarding school and later the Anglican San Albano in Buenos Aires. Then a hole opened up in the family.

“WITH JESUS, WHICH IS BETTER BY FAR”

Luis was ten when his father died. According to a later life sketch, this happened in 1944, within a few days of catching pneumonia. I have found that year and that cause in only one source.

Palau told himself how his father died, in his memoir and in interviews. On his deathbed his father sang and clapped, and pointed upward. His last words, according to his son, were: “I am going to be with Jesus, which is better by far.” It is almost exactly what the apostle Paul wrote: For I am hard-pressed between the two, having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better (Philippians 1:23). Palau later said that this deathbed shaped his faith in eternal life. We know the scene only from his own memory.

What came next is found in many sources. The family lost its wealth. According to English-language Wikipedia, which relies on a profile in The Oregonian from 2003, relatives mishandled what was left. Palau told the Associated Press a detail he never forgot: his mother cut one steak into eight pieces, so that everyone at the table had something.

What she did left a mark on his life. His memoir opens with her story. She taught him to sing, to recite Bible verses and to pray. She believed, he wrote, that God would provide, and somehow He did.

THE CAMP IN SUMMER

Two years after his father’s death, Luis went to a summer camp. There a camp counselor talked with him, and he chose to follow Jesus. The sources differ on the year: the Wheaton College archives and the Argentine parliament give 1946, Christianity Today and the diary note give 1947. The note dated February 12 makes 1947 the most likely.

A twelve-year-old boy, without a father, at a summer camp. I do not know what you thought about God when you were twelve. Luis wrote it down, date and all.

In those years he dreamed of studying law. According to the Argentine parliament, he wanted to become a lawyer so he could help widows like his mother. It turned out differently. Around the age of eighteen he had to start working, because the family needed the money.

A JOB AT THE BANK OF LONDON

Luis found work at a branch of the Bank of London, a British bank. Where that branch was is less certain than it seems. Two sources name Córdoba, the large city in the interior. A report from the Associated Press names Buenos Aires. Perhaps he worked in both cities. I have not been able to find out.

In 1952 he heard an American evangelist preaching on the radio: Billy Graham. It set him in motion. According to his own organization, he prayed then that God would make him an evangelist, like Graham. He also read a book by Graham about a campaign in the Los Angeles area, with some three thousand people every night.

The start was hard. He preached his first sermon in a small church in the hills, to about thirty-five people. He imitated Graham, with a loud voice and waving arms. It was, as he himself later said, a flop.

Somewhere in that period he told his mother that he was waiting for a calling. She pointed him to a village in the hills where there was no Bible-believing church. In an interview from 2018 he passed on her answer: that calling had already gone out two thousand years ago.

A SPANISH BIBLE FROM 1953

In the Museum of the Bible in Washington lies a small Spanish Bible, printed in 1950. Palau bought it in 1953 in Buenos Aires. It contains notes and sermon outlines from his early years.

These were the years when he led two lives. On weekdays he worked at the bank. On weekends he preached, also in the street. At nineteen he had his own Christian radio program. When he was twenty-two, he organized tent meetings with friends and an evangelistic radio program in Buenos Aires.

He was a bank clerk with a microphone.

AN AMERICAN AT A BIBLE STUDY

In Argentina, Luis attended a Bible study led by the American pastor Ray Stedman. Stedman urged him to train in the United States, and in 1960 he went. For a time Palau lived with him, in the San Francisco area.

After that he took a one-year program at the Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon. It became a difficult year. Palau later said that he struggled with pride there. In a class taught by the British speaker Major Ian Thomas, something fell into place. He understood, as he put it himself, that Christ truly lived in him.

At Multnomah he met Patricia Scofield. They married in 1961. In 1962 he became an American citizen, and that same year he did an internship at a Billy Graham campaign in Fresno, California, where he also interpreted. The man he had heard on the radio ten years earlier was now standing beside him.

OVERSEAS CRUSADES: COLOMBIA AND MEXICO

In 1961 Palau joined Overseas Crusades, known in Latin America as SEPAL and today as OC International. It was an American mission organization. With Pat he lived briefly in Detroit and then in Costa Rica, Colombia and Mexico.

There is a tension in his story here that I do not want to polish away. Palau was an Argentine who preached in Latin America, but his base was in the United States and he worked for an American organization. According to AL DÍA, he interpreted for Graham at Spanish-language campaigns for some twenty years. In 1970 Graham helped him with start-up money. The New York Times wrote at his death that he worked mainly outside the United States for his first twenty years, partly out of respect for the place Graham held there.

In 1964, at a campaign in Colombia, he started the radio program Luis Palau Responde, “Luis Palau answers.” Listeners came with questions from their daily lives. He listened and answered from the Bible, while others listened in. The Wheaton College archives still keep recordings.

Around 1966 he held his first large campaign in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. A year later he became director of SEPAL for Latin America. For the last two years he was president of the whole organization.

A TWELVE-MINUTE MEETING

In the 1970s his work grew quickly. He bought television airtime, in prime time, and invited viewers to come with their doubts. In 1974 he had a twelve-minute appointment in Guatemala with President Carlos Arana Osorio. According to Christianity Today, the conversation lasted an hour, and the president accepted a Bible.

Relations among Christians also cost him effort. In 1976 he called off a campaign in Chicago for Spanish-speaking Christians, because Pentecostal churches and other evangelical churches could not agree with one another. Pentecostals put strong emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as speaking in tongues and prayer for the sick. A campaign required the churches of a city to work together, and that did not always happen.

In 1977 he spoke to more than sixty thousand people in Wales in one month. In October 1978, with Graham’s support, he started his own organization, the Luis Palau Evangelistic Association, with headquarters in the Portland area.

GUATEMALA, 1982

One campaign from those years honestly belongs in this chapter. In 1982 Palau held a large celebration in Guatemala, Gratitude ’82. General Efraín Ríos Montt, who had come to power in a coup shortly before, was there. Palau estimated the attendance at half a million.

In the same months, reports came out about violence by the army against the population. The National Council of Churches in the United States reported atrocities. In an interview with Christianity Today, Palau said that his team had heard conflicting stories. The New York Times wrote at his death that he was criticized for this cooperation.

I am not judging the heart of a man I did not know. I do note that an evangelist who gets a full grandstand thanks to a ruler also gets that ruler’s shadow. By his own account, Palau wanted to stay out of politics. In Guatemala he did not fully succeed.

The same interview also touched on the other side of politics. In those years liberation theology was strong in Latin America, especially in the Roman Catholic Church. It read the Bible from the struggle of the poor against injustice and oppression. Palau opposed it. He saw in it a different understanding of sin, redemption and new birth from what he read in the Bible. He also spoke about Uruguay, where the security services distrusted Protestants and had recently expelled Protestants from the country because they were suspected of hiding weapons. An evangelist who traveled from country to country on that continent had to explain again and again who he was and who he was not.

In those years his vision reached far beyond Latin America. He was one of the few Western preachers allowed to speak in the Soviet Union. After that came a long campaign in London, which ran until the summer of 1984. In 1986 there were six evenings in the national stadium in Singapore. According to the campaign’s own figures, 337,500 people came, and 11,902 people registered a response. Shortly before, the same stadium had hosted a gathering for children, with about ten thousand children.

He was not welcome everywhere. In 2005 the city of Cardiff in Wales canceled a reception for him, because of what the city called his extreme evangelical views. In the United States, by contrast, The New York Times named him in 1999 as the leading candidate to succeed Billy Graham.

FROM CRUSADE TO FESTIVAL

Campaigns like these were called crusades. In the 1990s his sons pressed him to drop that word. According to Evangelical Focus, the idea came from his son Andrés. Palau resisted at first. Then he came around.

From 1999 he held festivals, in city parks instead of sports stadiums. There were Christian bands, skate ramps, activities for families, and the churches of the city did volunteer work together. He still preached there, with an invitation to follow Jesus. He told the Associated Press in 2003: “It revolutionized everything we do.”

The festivals also went back to the continent where he had begun. In Lima, Peru, an estimated seven hundred thousand people listened in 2004. In March 2008 he stood in Buenos Aires by the Obelisco, the well-known monument in the city center. The Argentine parliament speaks of more than a million people, Evangelical Focus of press reports giving that estimate on the second evening. In 2015 he held a week-long festival in New York, closing with a gathering in Central Park where, according to CBN News, some sixty thousand people came.

Long before that he had become friends with an Argentine Roman Catholic priest, Jorge Bergoglio. When Bergoglio became Pope Francis in 2013, Palau responded with joy. It says something about him. The son of a Brethren family called the new pope a friend.

FIFTEEN YEARS AWAY FROM HOME

There is a price that comes with a life like this. Palau calculated himself that in fifty-seven years of marriage he had been separated from his wife and sons for about fifteen years, because of all the travel. After dangerous experiences abroad, Pat and he had decided that she would stay in Oregon with the four boys.

He did not regret it, he told Christianity Today. But he spoke about it openly. How much are you willing to miss for what you believe God is asking of you? Palau gave an answer, and his family carried it with him.

He held his last large festival in 2019 in Madrid, with about eighty-five thousand people. That same year his life story appeared, Palau: A Life on Fire. There was also a feature film about his youth in Argentina, Palau, with the Argentine actor Gastón Pauls.

JANUARY 2018

In January 2018, Palau announced in a video that he had stage four lung cancer. He was eighty-three. He said that everything was ready if the Lord wanted to take him home. According to Salt&Light, he added that anyone who reads the Bible knows there comes a time to go.

He lived for more than three more years. In November 2018 he told a local newspaper that the disease was stable for the time being. In February 2021 he was admitted to the hospital, and after that he stopped treatment.

On Thursday, March 11, 2021, Luis Palau died at home in Portland, eighty-six years old. His family wrote that morning that he had passed away suddenly, and very peacefully. He left behind his wife Patricia, four sons and twelve grandchildren.

In Argentina, a member of the Chamber of Deputies submitted a motion to express mourning and to recognize his work. The boy from Ingeniero Maschwitz, who preached on weekends as a bank clerk, had not been forgotten in his own country.

At his death Evangelical Focus quoted him: “If I was given a thousand lifetimes, I would dedicate them all to the same calling.”

You can argue about his methods, about the big stadiums and the television airtime, about Guatemala. In any case, it did not begin in a stadium. It began in a house where a father died singing, and at a table where one steak was cut into eight pieces.

And at a summer camp in February, where a twelve-year-old boy wrote down a sentence, with the date above it.