Agape Community Baptist Church

San Diego Reader: What is your favorite subject on which to preach?

Pastor Victor Vaughn: My favorite subject is how the Jewish Passover relates to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. First, it shows the sovereignty of God and the plan of God for salvation. It shows he is sovereign over history and that Christ died on Passover was God’s plan to show us that Jesus died to set us free, to be able to worship God. In Passover, God sees the blood on the doorpost and promises to pass over those houses — so the blood of Jesus was shed so the judgment might pass over us by grace. We’re made free by grace. So the message is about freedom and trusting God’s promise; it’s about the mystery of God’s control of history and plan for us in it.

SDR: Why did you become a minister in the first place?

PV: I became a minister because first of all I felt called. I fell in love with the Lord and felt that he was calling me. I don’t know what he was calling me to — but, as I was living in Cambodia and Thailand for ten years, I felt the call and that God wanted me to become a minister.

SDR: What is the mission of your church?

PV: The mission of Agape is to make God’s love and truth known to the world, and to be a light for the world and instruments to reflect that love. Agape means love — it is the highest form of love in Greek in terms of the way it is considered. It’s unconditional love — which is God’s love for us. It’s our desire, which isn’t to say we’ve reached that goal, but our desire is to reflect God’s unconditional love to each other and to the world. Agape is an amazing little church because, even though we have only 40 or 50 people on a Sunday morning, we are very mixed — just last Sunday we had Anglos, African-American, Filipino, Ethiopian, Chinese, Cambodian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Persian.

SDR: Where do you go when you die?

PV: God created man’s spirit to be eternal. Man will live forever — in the spirit and image of God. So those who know Christ and experienced what the blood of Christ offers to them will surely go to heaven; and those who don’t, Jesus warned about the issues related to hell. I believe there is a hell. I don’t claim to understand all of it but if you ask do I believe hell in real, I do believe it is real in some sense. If a man’s not accepted as a child of God, then he’s left to live forever without God. That is hell — eternally existing continually separated from God and remembering the opportunities to live instead with God. That is eternal torment to the soul. It’s not my job to point my finger and condemn people to hell; rather, my job is to preach the hope of forgiveness and salvation. The ultimate judgment is going to rest with God for each individual at death.