Luis Cabral (evangelist)

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Luis Cabral is a Portuguese Protestant evangelist. Born in Angola around 1965, Cabral was raised in a nominally Catholic household, but was converted to Pentecostalism at the age of 18. After graduating from university with a law degree, Cabral worked for a time in television and in business. He felt his true calling was the ministry and was ordained in his early twenties. He then became as a pastor in the Portuguese branch of the Assemblies of God denomination, taking over a congregation of just seventeen members and building it up to several hundred in five years. He subsequently worked in a church of five thousand, one of the largest Protestant congregations in a country that was overwhelmingly Catholic.

Cabral later moved to South Africa, where he worked as a crusade organizer for the evangelist Pieter Pretorius. While there, he believed he had heard from God to go "to the ends of the earth," and immigrated to New Zealand in 1997.

Cabral was an Associate Pastor at Auckland's Takapuna Assembly of God from 1999 to 2003, when he decided to go into evangelism full-time. Takapuna remains his home church, where he remains on staff as an evangelist, though he has spent less time there in 2005 than in previous years, as his evangelistic ministry has taken him throughout New Zealand. He also held crusades in Portugal, Mozambique, Malaysia, Indonesia, England and India in 2003 and 2004. Early in 2005, he led a missions team to Panama, and has more international crusades planned for the year.

An uncompromising fundamentalist, Luis Cabral holds to a literal interpretation of the Bible. He is a firm creationist and is a passionate believer that Biblical miracles are real and able to be duplicated in the present day. Praying for healing is therefore an important part of his ministry. He is strongly opposed to abortion and pre-marital sex. He is a fervent believer in a literal hell.

In addition to his native Portuguese, Cabral is fluent in English, French, and Spanish, and speaks some Swahili. He is married to Alexandra, a musician, and has a daughter, Sofia (aged 8), and a son, Philip (aged 2). His hobbies include painting, and he uses the proceeds from sales of his art work to support his evangelistic ministry.