This article was published in a newspaper in Longmont, CO earlier this month. I thought you might want to get a peek of our speaker for the upcoming revival meetings next week.
Publish Date: 11/3/2006
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Road to faith
Traveling evangelist takes ministry on the highway
LONGMONT — The demands of the job are great: long hours, little vacation time and a boss who goes by The Book.
The benefits, says Steve Pettit, are greater: eternal salvation.
“I come into a church to strengthen people and to stir them up,” he said. “I want them to believe.”
Pettit is an evangelist, a traveling preacher who hits the highways (and occasionally the friendly skies) September through May to spread the good news of Jesus Christ, annually racking up more than 30,000 miles on the odometer.
He and his evangelistic team follow the Son, emphasizing revival and evangelism in the name of Jesus Christ. Pettit has conducted more than 700 campaigns, crusades and camps throughout the United States and has preached in 14 foreign countries.
This week, Pettit visited Faith Baptist Church in Longmont and gave evangelistic services each night. The church has these weeklong meetings twice a year, in the spring and fall, along with shorter meetings throughout the year, said the Rev. Rick Cross.
“They are designed to give us a different voice in the pulpit,” Cross said. “They invigorate us spiritually and provide a means of outreach to the community.”
Faith Baptist has invited Pettit four times in the last two decades because the evangelist is a favorite at the congregation, Cross said.
Church member Marc Schulman has seen Pettit every night this week. He considers Pettit’s visit a blessing each time.
“I’ve changed trips around to make sure I was here when he was here,” said Schulman, who works in management, consulting and sales. “That’s how good it is.”
Pettit, 50, said he grew up in the “culturally religious” South, in a semi-religious Presbyterian household.
He “came to understand the Gospel, that faith is faith in Christ” in high school and college. He attended The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina, where his Christian roommate essentially “was my preacher.”
With a degree in business administration, Pettit attended Bob Jones University for seminary.
“I surrendered to the ministry, as they say,” said Pettit, who went to Michigan in 1980 to serve as an associate pastor for five years. In 1982, he began to spend summers as a preacher at Northland Camp and Conference Center in Dunbar, Wis.; he is now the camp’s director, serving 4,000 visitors annually.
But “it was at this time I felt like my gift lay in the area of evangelizing,” he said, and took his ministry, and young family, on the road.
Pettit is a married father of two daughters, ages 24 and 22, and two sons, ages 18 and 9.
His wife, Terry, is from Denver. Pettit met her at a church service where she was a cantor; her mother’s family is from Longmont. His children grew up on the road, he said, but consider Colorado “home-ish.”
In 1995, the couple added an evangelistic team of collegiate singles, a third of whom ended up marrying another team member, Pettit said. The ensemble performs and records CDs, which fund the traveling ministry, he said.
For 27 years, Pettit’s home church was First Baptist Church in Bridgeport, Mich., but he recently switched to Brookside Baptist in Wisconsin, where the family owns a house.
Pettit said the evangelistic team visits churches by invitation. He gets so many that he plans his travels four years out.
“Right now, I’m working on my 2010 schedule,” he said.
The team travels in a 12-passenger van, two Ford F-350 trucks and a 43-foot-long trailer.
“From both a Biblical and historical position and practice, evangelism has been itinerant. There are so many ways to spread the good news. One is relational — that’s me. A friend told me about the Lord. There’s also preaching, which is much more declarative.”
Cross said Pettit gives a national perspective on the issues facing Christians, especially young people.
“From our perspective,” Cross said, “a week is successful if folks are drawn into a closer relationship with Jesus Christ. If folks trust Christ as savior, if folks have a greater appreciation for the claims of Christ on their lives, if folks are making progressive steps in their walk with the Lord, then we are thrilled.”
So who rejuvenates the traveling preacher?
“A Christian has an internal source of power that is given to him when he becomes a believer,” Pettit said. “There are tests of faith, from the big things, like my wife’s cancer (now in remission), to dealing with irritating people. I can’t afford to have a pity party. I don’t have the freedom to have bad days.”
Pettit said most evangelists quietly fight the stereotypes that they are money-hungry “fire and brimstone and damnation” preachers.
He and his family take vacations (a professional soccer match in London, a tour of Israel) and spend Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day together.
At the end of a day full of greeting and handshaking, Pettit joked, “We like to say we wash the fellowship off our hands.”
“The reality is that there are lots of people who do what I do,” he said, “and nobody will hear about these spiritual, godly, humble, unselfish people. Our joy is found in serving.”
