Evangelists

Who is this Luis Palau whose name shows up on posters, lawn signs and bumper stickers across Los Angeles and is the buzz of the evangelical churches? He is an Argentine-born evangelist who is believed to have preached en masse to more people--10 million souls in 60 countries--than anyone but Billy Graham. Despite that, he is a little-known figure outside the world of evangelical churches and traveling crusades.

Jim Bakker, the embattled television evangelist who resigned last year as president of the PTL ministry amid a sex-and-hush-money scandal, was indicted Monday along with a former top associate on federal charges of fraud and conspiracy in the sale of "lifetime partnerships" for yearly vacations at a PTL theme park and resort.

For eight years, Revolution Square has been center stage for the Sandinistas--a space in downtown Managua filled by the ruling party's supporters for each official pronouncement on its revolutionary course. But Sunday the square was occupied, for the third day in a row, by another crowd and a different message. The spellbound audience, 25,000 strong, belonged to Jimmy Swaggart, the first big-time American evangelist to hold a revival in Sandinista-run Nicaragua.

Long before Billy Graham ascended to the pinnacle of the evangelical mountain, that spot was occupied by a onetime Placentia farmer, a smiling fundamentalist whose approach to Christianity drew 20 million radio listeners to his "Old Fashioned Revival Hour." Charles E. Fuller, the pioneering broadcast evangelist and founder of a theological seminary he named for his father, left the orange-growing business to become the pastor of a worldwide radio congregation.

Almost every spring for 33 years, Everett Bachelder has set God adrift in the Bering Sea in 2,000 mayonnaise jars, ketchup bottles and plastic wrappers. It's the Gospel afloat off the starboard bow, the sea-tossed sermon of a bottle evangelist. Bachelder and his wife, Mina, see theirs as a mission of faith. They drop bits of Scripture, expressed in 100 different languages, into the powerful Arctic currents at the top of the world. Their inspiration came from a Tacoma, Wash.

He is the last riot victim still hospitalized, a man in a coma whose beating remains an obscure counterpoint to the televised assault of trucker Reginald O. Denny. While Denny's assault was witnessed by millions, only a few dozen watched as Wallace Tope, a street evangelist, was beaten as he was preaching to looters in Hollywood. Now, as the city anxiously awaits the outcome of the Denny trial, the Tope case is largely forgotten.

Sunday afternoon--the Lord's day--on Hollywood Boulevard: The marquee at the X Theaters advertised a double feature, "Sensual Fire" and "Fantastic Orgy." Members of the British band Pop Will Eat Itself, in Los Angeles for their first American tour, went out for breakfast at 2 p.m., dressed mostly in leather, all in black. A busload of suit-clad Korean businessmen snapped photos.

A federal judge sentenced defrocked television evangelist Jim Bakker to 45 years in prison and fined him $500,000 on Tuesday for perpetrating a "massive fraud" on the followers of his PTL ministry. U.S. District Judge Robert Potter, known here as "Maximum Bob" because of his stiff sentences, refused Bakker's plea to remain free pending appeal and ordered him sent to a federal facility in Talladega, Ala. Bakker was led from the federal courthouse in handcuffs.

A 15-year-old boy testified Thursday that he was beaten bloody with a large wooden paddle at evangelist Tony Alamo's religious commune in Saugus in 1988 and that Alamo himself directed the paddling by telephone. In more than five hours of testimony at a child-abuse hearing in Newhall Municipal Court, Jeremiah (Justin) Miller said he was held down by four people and hit about 140 times with a paddle wielded like a baseball bat as about 40 of Alamo's followers looked on.

In the military vernacular used by his hymn-singing, check-writing "prayer warriors," a Texas television evangelist came and saw, but could not conquer. The Rev. Larry Lea sought to "exorcise sin" from San Francisco on Wednesday night, but had to do it from inside the Civic Center Auditorium while 1,500 vocal demonstrators chanted outside and San Francisco engaged in its usual raucous and lascivious Halloween festivities.