Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington was baptized on Saturday in an emotional ceremony in Kelly Temple Church of God in Christ in the Harlem, New York.
The service was livestreamed on Facebook by the First Jurisdiction Church of God in Christ Eastern New York.
Washington was baptized and received his certificate of baptism, per Today. He was also given a minister license, which will enable him to be ordained in the future.
“In one week I turn 70,” Washington said. “It took a while, but I’m here.”
Washington remembered when he was 20 and was sitting in his mom’s beauty parlor.
A woman named Ruth Green said to him, “Boy, you are going to travel the world and preach to millions of people.”
“She wouldn’t even spell the word prophecy. My mother wrote the word prophecy…50 years later, look at God. If He can do this for me, there’s nothing He can’t do for you. The sky literally is the limit and there’s no limit to the sky,” the actor said.
He also spoke allegiance to the church.
“To God be the glory. Hallelujah!” he said. “Anything I can do, I will do for this church, the Almighty. I just want to be in that number when the saints go marching in.”
Washington has been open about his faith and wrote about it in a November essay for Esquire.
“Things I said about God when I was a little boy, just reciting them in church along with everybody else, I know now,” he wrote. “God is real. God is love. God is the only way. God is the true way. God blesses.”
“It’s my job to lift God up, to give Him praise, to make sure that anyone and everyone I speak to the rest of my life understands that He is responsible for me,” he added.
