Melissa Joan Hart says her family has always “leaned in” to their faith — but 16-year-old son Brady’s decision to dedicate his life to Christ was a welcomed holiday surprise.
“[My kids] were all baptized as babies, because I was raised Catholic and my husband was raised Baptist. We kind of raised them Presbyterian, but we’re back in a Baptist church now and Brady just felt very called,” Hart, 49, exclusively told Us Weekly while discussing her charity work with World Vision.
(While it’s common practice for Catholics and Presbyterians to baptize babies to ensure they are not sent to purgatory if they should die, Baptists do not follow the practice and instead wait to baptize a child only after they’ve accepted Christ into their life.)
“He has a great youth pastor that has inspired him,” Hart continued. “He’s got teachers at school that are constantly talking to him about faith, friends that he talks to about faith. And it started to really mean a lot to him in the last year. It started to really resonate with him.”
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Hart, who also shares sons Mason, 19, and Tucker, 13, with husband Mark Wilkerson, quipped that Bible class is the one place Brady gets a perfect grade “every year,” and the class he “really focuses” on. “He understands it and it fills him,” she said.
Hart first revealed last month that Brady made the “beautiful choice” to dedicate his life to Christ and get re-baptized. She shared that she and Wilkerson, 49, “had him baptized as a baby to make a promise as a family to raise him up to know Christ,” but he was now reaffirming that choice on his own.
“Today he made the decision to follow Christ and to have his church family witness his dedication and be a shining light for the Glory of God!” Hart wrote via Instagram alongside a photo from the service. “God Bless and Keep you Brady! John 3:30.”
While speaking to Us, Hart explained that her youngest son, Tucker, actually was the one who told her Brady’s news “like a month before” the baptism occurred.
“I was like, ‘What?’ So Brady talked about it a little bit, and then finally, he was like, ‘Hey, would next weekend be a good weekend for me to be baptized?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, OK, let’s do that,’” she told Us, adding that “it was all him.”
On the day of the service, Hart confessed she and Wilkerson couldn’t hold back their emotions — and Brady was quick to call his parents out on their blubbering.
“People were handing us tissues! My husband and I sat in the front. We always sit in the back of the church. We were sitting in the front of the church, right in the aisle, and just bawling,” Hart said with a laugh. “And [Brady’s] like, ‘I looked over at you guys. You were just like a mess.’ Like, sorry!”
While Hart didn’t necessarily see Brady’s dedication coming, she did point out that faith has always been a big part of her family, sharing that they “lean into” their religion together by praying “every meal, before we travel” and “night and morning when we know someone’s having struggles.”
The Sabrina the Teenage Witch star noted that this year brought a certain set of struggles that may have inspired Brady to delve deeper into his faith.
“We just went through some tough times this year with losing loved ones and a friend of ours getting cancer and things,” she explained. “So it’s been a little bit of a rough year, and we’ve really leaned into prayer as a family.”
She added that all five of them “quote Scripture a lot,” and that the kids “see their father reading the Bible every morning at 5:30” before getting in her car to hear it playing on tape.
“So they witness a lot of that faith. And I think through that faith, they’ve just felt stronger,” she added.
Hart and Wilkerson have also instilled other values in their sons from a young age, including learning the importance of giving back. She recalled one of her son’s falling in love with a rainbow looming as a child — something that led him to selling bracelets backstage on the set of her sitcom Melissa and Joey. He later donated his profits to the MaxLove Project, which works to improve the quality of life of families facing childhood cancers, pediatric rare diseases and chronic hospitalizations.
From there, the family discovered World Vision, a Christian-focused humanitarian aid non-profit that provides water, healthcare, education, protection and income generation for children around the world through a sponsorship program. Hart and her family have been sponsoring three girls “for our three boys” in Zambia over the past four years and even made trips to visit them in 2019 and 2023.
“I can tell you, in those four years of doing the program, the difference in the little amount of money we send over there every month was incredible,” she gushed. “They had, like, a tiny little structure on the property where, like 15 of them would sleep, and they didn’t really have clean water nearby, so the girls were having to do the water walk, and they had a really small garden that only had these green leafy vegetables, and they didn’t really have a bathroom.”
Now, thanks to their donation and the generosity of others, Hart said the village has a well which allows the girls enough time to attend school. A new “hygiene program” has also been implemented, and Hart gifted bicycles to help the girls get to and from their classes each day.
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“You can gift goats to a family in Honduras, or you can gift medical supplies to a family in Africa. I mean, there’s everything in there, from animals to backpacks to school stuff to even feminine products,” she explained of World Vision’s gift catalog. “Literally everything domestic, international, and you can find what it is that you think kids and families need right now. You can make that donation and it’ll go to help. It really is a gift that keeps on giving.”
Hart pointed out that during the holiday season in particular, donating in someone else’s name can often be an effective gift when you aren’t sure of their personal tastes.
“Especially for people that you don’t know that well, I feel like it’s a great gift to give when you’re like, ‘Do I get them a candle? Or, ‘What if they don’t drink and I give them a bottle of wine?’” she explained. “So instead of more crap piling up in the closet or something that someone’s going to re-gift, why don’t you do something that actually means something, and really will help people out?”
