What does your encounter with Jesus look like?
For eight weekends this summer, the Sunland-Tujunga church explored this question with a series themed “A Summer Encounter: Walking in the Footsteps of Jesus.”
“I just wanted the topics to be Christ centered,” Associate Pastor Mabel Duncan shared. Topics included heaven, judgement, tithing, Christian lifestyle, state of the dead, baptism, and many more.
On the second weekend of the series, Duncan blurted out: “We are going to have a baptism.“ “The moment I said it,” she recalled, “I gulped and was wondering why I said that.” One week later, God revealed what this statement was all about.
Part of the campaign was food demos preceding the spiritual meetings. After one of these demos, three visitors were invited to join the meetings upstairs. They didn’t know the meetings were happening, but after this, they never stopped coming.
“It’s one thing to see people accept Jesus as their savior,” Duncan said, “but it’s a whole other thing to see them fall in love with Jesus. And that family fell in love with Jesus.”
They were eager to get involved. The Sabbath after one of the visitors, Weanchi, was baptized, she was insistent on doing the Scripture reading. Then, the week after Marianne and Daniel, Weanchi’s daughter and sonin- law, were baptized, they blessed the church with a message in song.
This isn’t to say their journey was easy. On the day Marianne and Daniel were to be baptized, “all hell broke loose,” as Duncan put it. Satan sought in multiple ways to disrupt the service — yet, God fought for these souls. “We have had some interesting things happen, to say the least,” Duncan recalled, “but God has proven Himself mighty to save.”
“If God asks you to do something, all you need to ask is, ‘How soon, Lord?’ and don’t limit Him,” Duncan urged. “Because I saw Him work. I saw Him do what was considered impossible.”
