Evangelism

It was Saturday night and the cool crowd in the upscale Moema neighborhood was stepping out -- to church. "We are not square," a self-proclaimed reformed addict and former biker turned preacher said amid a blur of strobe and laser lights, "because Jesus is not square!" Welcome to the Reborn in Christ Church, the hippest of Brazil's booming "neo-Pentecostal" denominations, which fuse faith and sales in a high-pressure pitch at churches, over the airwaves and on the Internet.

The books are ready for shipment, fans are waiting breathlessly for the final installment, and tables in bookstores across America will soon be piled high with stacks of the newly published thriller. But we're talking heaven, not Hogwarts. This week, "Kingdom Come," the 16th and last novel in the hugely successful "Left Behind" evangelical series, will be released, and the publication marks the culmination of a sea change in the American book world.

During a career spanning more than half a century, religious crusader the Rev. Billy Graham urged presidents, gangsters and African lepers to "take Christ into your heart and be saved." But it was his first crusade, in Los Angeles in 1949, that catapulted him to religious stardom. He called it the Greater Los Angeles Billy Graham Crusade at the "Canvas Cathedral With the Steeple of Light."

Paul Filidis thought little of Christianity as he backpacked through Afghanistan in the early 1970s, searching for top-grade hashish and Eastern enlightenment. Then his passport was stolen and he took shelter with a group of missionaries who had moved to Kabul to help wanderers on the hippie trail. "They looked just like me," Filidis said. The missionaries took Filidis in and helped him get a new passport.

Answering an evangelical call to arms, Christians will gather in communities across the nation tonight to watch President Bush's State of the Union address. They will invite local media to listen in as they measure Bush's policies against the moral values laid out in the Bible. But don't expect a lot of applause for the president. These "watch parties" are being organized by a small but growing movement of evangelical Christians who no longer want to be defined by gay marriage and abortion.

Pastors of some of the largest evangelical churches in America met Tuesday in Inglewood to polish strategies for starting 5 million new churches worldwide in 10 years -- an effort they hope will hasten the End Time. The Rapture and Second Coming of Jesus has always been the ultimate goal of evangelicalism. But when that would occur was any Christian's guess.

Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies. "Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, \o7were you there\f7?' Can you remember that?"

As Afghan officials considered last week whether a medical aid worker should be executed for converting from Islam to Christianity, an alliance of small Christian congregations in the San Francisco Bay Area was working to spread the Gospel to more Muslims in the Middle East. "We are very proud of that man because he has not denied his Christianity," said Navid Moborez, 29, an Afghan Christian and former Muslim who now lives in Fremont and belongs to the Iranian Christian Church here.

A state appeals court for the second time ruled Friday that an Orange County community college district should not have sold its public television station to a foundation instead of televangelists who offered more money. The 4th District Court of Appeal said the Coast Community College District can either keep KOCE-TV or put it up for sale again. The district already has transferred the station and broadcast license to the nonprofit KOCE-TV Foundation, and neither is sure what will happen next.

The televangelist network embroiled in a fight for Orange County's PBS station has resurrected its $25.1-million purchase offer and further offered to pay any sale-related legal claims against the college district that owns KOCE. But the offer by Daystar Television Network may mean little because of legal questions surrounding the station's sale to a local foundation.