Next big Palau bash might aid homeless

     PORTLAND — Evangelist Luis Palau will hold his next massive Portland Festival — the first in eight years — in August 2008 at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, but this one might zero in on the area’s homelessness.
      As reported June 20 by Willamette Week, suburban megachurches might follow Palau’s suggestion and join with mayors and commissioners in Portland, Bea-verton, and Hillsboro in an outpouring for the homeless.
      A model to follow will be Palau’s festival in Houston, Texas last October, which drew 225,000 people. Local churches there led a citywide food drive at the festival and cleaned up 211 vacant lots near schools in one day.
      Last fall, Portland Mayor Tom Potter asked Palau to help the homeless in the area. Palau sounded out pastors in some of the largest evangelical churches while meeting again with Potter in December, then City Commissioner Eric Sten in March, Beaverton Mayor Rob Drake in May, and Hillsboro Mayor Tom Hughes in June.
      In the meantime, Sten and newly rehired housing aide Marshall Runkel are working on a menu of simple, concrete ways that churches could help the homeless. Sten said he sees tremendous potential in collaborating with churches or any community group that’s serious about helping.
      Sten added that homeless people need to have a community that can help them reintegrate, noting that whether one calls it the spirit or soul or what makes us human, it tends to shrivel up when one is chronically homeless.
Palau’s first Portland Festival in 1999 drew 93,000 people over a two-day period, and the second, held in 2000, attracted 140,000. Back in 2005, Potter first asked Palau to help get churches to do something about homelessness.
      For Palau and his son Kevin, executive vice-president of his father’s ministry, a change was under way to work on campaigns battling poverty, AIDS in Africa, and even global warming.
      Alan Hotchkiss, national director of church mobilization for the Palau association, said that evangelicals have a ways to go before they can match the efforts of groups such as Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Afro-American churches.
      Hotchkiss said the evangelical community has been really good at sharing the gospel, but pretty poor in helping people at their point of need in the community.
      Palau’s “Great Music and Good News” festivals, held since 1999 in locations nationally and internationally, have evolved over time, adding Christian pop music and skateboard and BMX riding. Kevin Palau believes that at the heart of the Christian believers he knows, there’s a genuine sense that they want to be part of the community.