Knocking on One Door Leads to 9 Baptisms

It began when Erica and I prayed that her husband would join our Bible study.

By Yolanda Martinez Santos

Erica’s husband didn’t seem pleased when he found his wife and me studying the Bible in the living room of their home in the U.S. state of California.

The husband, a member of another religious denomination, walked in on our second Bible study together. He is a large man, and I honestly felt scared. I stopped the Bible study and introduced myself.

“My name is Yolanda Martinez Santos, and I am with the Seventh-day Adventist Church,” I said, extending a hand.

I had first knocked on Erica’s door two weeks earlier as a student with Souls West, an evangelism school owned and operated in Arizona by the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Pacific Union. I had been going door to door, offering literature at the request of a local church.

Despite the surprise of Erica’s husband, he did not ask me to leave. But Erica later told me that he was unhappy that wife was receiving Bible studies from someone who was so young — and a woman. Erica said her husband planned to invite over an older couple from his denomination to give Bible studies instead.

Erica and I prayed that her husband would allow us to study the Bible together — and that he would join us.

To our astonishment, the husband joined us at our next meeting! He also announced that he would study with us every week.

No long after that, Erica invited her brother to our Bible study, and he eagerly accepted. Then Erika’s 13-year-old son asked if he could study the Bible with me alone. I asked him why he wanted the personal attention.

“I want to get to know Jesus for myself,” he said simply.

How could a refuse such an earnest request?

“OK,” I said. “We will get to know Jesus.”

As the Bible studies continued, Erica began sharing what she was learning with her sister, who lives in another city. The sister wanted to know more, so she reached out to local Adventists and started studying the Bible with them. The sister’s husband and mother-in-law joined them.

That’s not all.

After a while, Erica introduced me to her parents., who told me that Erica had become a different person. They said they wanted whatever she had.

“What you are missing is Jesus,” I said.

The parents started to study the Bible with us.

The big day finally came when Erica and her son gave their lives to Jesus. Among those present at their baptism were Erica’s parents, brother, and husband.

God is so good. It’s hard to believe that the knock of a Bible worker on just one door has now led to nine baptisms: Erica, her son, her brother, her mother, her father, her sister, her brother-in-law, and her sister’s mother-in-law. Even Erica’s neighbor was baptized.

And Erica’s husband? He attends the local Adventist church regularly.

Erica told me recently that when I knocked on her door that first time, she had been praying for an entire month that God would prove His existence and reveal the right church to her.

“If you had never knocked on my door, none of this would have happened,” Erica said. “I didn’t expect that one door knock could touch so many lives. God, You have answered my call!”

Yolanda Martinez Santos herself joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 2013 after a young literature evangelist with the Youth Rush summer program knocked on her door and sold her three books by church cofounder Ellen G. White: “The Great Controversy,” “Christ’s Object Lessons,” and “Steps to Christ.”