This Is What An Evangelical Festival Looks Like

The sky-blue walls of the former Vaudeville theater thundered with faith on Sunday morning in Corona, Queens. Some 600 worshipers rose to join the Latino band in song, shaking their tambourines, heads and hands in electric rapture.

The capacity crowd quieted when the pastor, Victor Tiburcio, took his place on stage, in front of a backdrop designed to look like the New York skyline and lit up like the set of a late-night talk show. Instead, it was the altar for his Pentecostal megachurch Aliento de Vida (Breath of Life), which Mr. Tiburcio and his wife, Hattie, immigrants from the Dominican Republic, opened in Queens 12 years ago.

Pastor Tiburcio had an important message for his congregation.

“We will have tickets for everybody here,” he said in Spanish, prompting more clapping.