No one thinks of a Southern Baptist evangelist as a guitar-playing, kilt-wearing Scotsman converted while listening to Billy Joel’s hit song, “I Love You Just the Way You Are.”
But then Bert Rait is not your average evangelist. In fact, “evangelist” is not a term he uses to describe his calling and ministry. Rait says he sees his task as “building up the church,” a job he considers essential if churches are to become more effective in missions and evangelism. “This is where my heart and my greatest vocational concern is,” says Rait, director of Calaedonia Ministries, the name of the ministry he founded in 1987 in the Washington suburb of Springfield, Va., to assist local churches to experience revival.
Rait says he works best where he is able to encourage the congregation’s leadership, minister to the pastor and “take the blindfold off sleepy members.” Rather than lead evangelistic crusades, Rait does concerts, leads conferences on witnessing and finding spiritual gifts and preaches revivals. “I like to touch people, put my arms around the kids, pat the dog. You can’t do that in a stadium.”
Sixteen years ago Rait was a 29-year-old entertainer making a more-than- adequate living delivering his polished comedy and pop music routine in British nightclubs. He traveled England and his native Scotland, playing 20- minute gigs to warm up audiences for featured performers. He was raised in Aberdeen, an oil city on the North Sea, the oldest of five children in a working-class family. His parents were members of the Plymouth Brethren or Puritan Church, a denomination Rait says “would make fundamentalists look like liberals.”
Although Rait was taught the Bible and remembers making “some sort of profession” as a boy, he says he was “absolutely nothing” spiritually. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, rock music and guitars were his life. By age 17 he caught his first big break as an entertainer, a gig in London, the equivalent of “being invited to Hollywood or New York.” The next 12 years Rait traveled and did situational comedy and concerts. He admits he was a “recycled teen- ager” and life was “unfulfilled.” “I was engulfed in secularism. Music was my god and life was alcohol and parties.” Occasionally he returned to Aberdeen to visit family. During one of these visits, in 1979, an encounter changed his life.
Rait’s mother and brother had become active in a year-old mission church planted by a Southern Baptist foreign missionary. Through what Rait calls “the quiet manipulation that only a mother can do,” the missionary visited the Rait home one Tuesday afternoon to meet the entertainer and invite him to lead the music at the following Sunday’s worship service.
Rait saw through the scheme but did not object. “I expected to get preached at, a guilt trip. But he (the missionary) was interested in me, not preaching at me or to me.” Rait agreed to do Sunday’s music at the mission. Between Tuesday and Sunday, in what Rait describes as a “miracle of miracles,” he attended a Christian rock concert which the mission sponsored to reach young people in Aberdeen. During the concert, as he listened to a rendition of Billy Joel’s “I Love You Just the Way You Are,” Rait was saved. “I knew it was the Lord speaking — it was very clear. It was an offer too good to turn down, really.”
“That night I gave my life, not just my heart, to Christ. I gave him my home, my possessions, my goals, my vocation, my vacation. I gave him everything — not just what I was, but what I was to become. That was the end of my first life.”
Not everyone was ecstatic over his conversion. Some, even in the church, saw the change as “suspect.” So for the next two years Rait says he “laid low” to “work out a map for myself, to come to terms with my decision.” To pay bills the former nightclub performer took a job as program director of the local YMCA, “a godsend,” he says, because he had Christian bosses. A summer missionary assigned to work in Aberdeen rented a room in Rait’s house. When he returned to the United States he engaged Rait in 1982 for a five-month music tour in several eastern states. The next year Rait returned for a three-month stint.
The missionary and Denton Lotz, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, whom Rait met while in the United States, encouraged him to attend seminary. In 1984 Rait sold his home, furniture, and with only his guitar and a suitcase, moved to Louisville, Ky., to enroll at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Seminary proved to be a “marvelous experience,” says Rait. In seminary Rait learned self-discipline, a trait he never needed in his profession as an entertainer. Also in seminary he continued to hone his skills as a Christian entertainer.
After graduation from seminary in 1987, Rait moved to Virginia to begin Calaedonia Ministries. Since then his ministry has grown steadily. He has done revivals or concerts in 33 states, and later this year will return to Great Britain for several bookings. Rait and his wife of three years, Laura, are members of Ivy Memorial Baptist Church in Newport News, Va.
Ted Harvey, pastor of Providence Baptist Church in McLean, Va., who used the Scottish revivalist last year for a Sunday-to-Wednesday revival, praised his style. “Bert’s ministry was anything but traditional. His combination of music and contemporary preaching reaches people in the 90s. He tells the old story in a way that it has a new and refreshing affect on people. Our seniors enjoyed him as much as our children.”
The life of a revivalist is not without risks. He is on the road 40 weeks each year and has no income apart from what he receives from his ministry. But Rait says he believes he has the gifts and optimistic, energetic personality necessary to thrive in this form of ministry. “I regard my calling as lifelong. I have never felt so fulfilled as I am now.”
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NewsCopyright (c) 1995 Baptist Press