Argentinian preacher is in Inverness to spread the word

evangelist says four-day festival will be ‘more fun than Rockness’

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MISSION: Luis Palau in Inverness yesterday prior to this weekend’s Christian festival in the city. Sandy McCook

A Highland festival starting tomorrow will be “more fun than RockNess,” according to its star performer who has reputedly played to worldwide audiences of more than a billion people.

Argentinian preacher Luis Palau spoke yesterday of his “homecoming” to a region whose missionaries introduced him to Christianity and to an area he first visited 30 years ago.

The 74-year-old grandson of Scot Robert Balfour was speaking on his arrival in Inverness on the latest leg of a global mission to spread the gospel.

The evangelist is headlining a four-day festival featuring a programme of music and family events at the city’s Eden Court and Bught Park which is expected to attract 10,000 people.

Acknowledging last weekend’s RockNess event, he said the next four days would be “more fun, for sure”.

“Joyful, cheerful and fun because it connects you with your Creator, which is the purpose of life.

“And it doesn’t leave a hangover.”

Well briefed on UK current affairs, Mr Palau cited the MPs’ expenses saga as evidence of “a steady drift away from the Christian ethic” which risked a “blurring” of society’s moral lines that could allow such an event to “become the norm, and not the exception”.

Insisting it was his intention to deliver a message of hope, he had, however, noticed big changes in the Highlands since 1979 with more secularisation and fewer youngsters joining church activities.

That, he said, left Scotland “virgin territory for spiritual things” in a land where youngsters “seem quite unknowing of basic Christian truths”.

This week’s Highland Luis Palau Festival is the culmination of a series of events in outlying Highland towns and villages backed by more than 100 churches of various denominations.