“The punishment phase does begin on Monday at 9 a.m. CST. They will be calling witnesses, and at this time (I) think it could go into the next day,” Samantha K. Jordan, a spokeswoman for the Tarrant County prosecutor’s office, said in an email Friday. “I believe we’re asking for the maximum punishment, which would be life.”

Aguilar, 45, was convicted on seven charges: two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child, three counts of sexual assault of a child under 17, and two counts of indecency with a child.

The aggravated sexual assault charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. The other counts, second-degree felonies, carry a maximum sentence of 20 years.

Aguilar was arrested May 21, 2013, on charges that he sexually abused an 11-year-old girl and her 13-year-old sister in the 1990s in Tarrant County.

He was sent to Texas and eventually released on $100,000 bond. He resigned from the ROC on June 5, 2013, a day after search warrants detailing the allegations were made public.

According to the arrest warrants and to court testimony, Aguilar began sexually assaulting the girls in October 1996 while living in their parents’ home.

Aguilar began staying at the home after the girls’ parents followed him from California to Fort Worth to join him at a church called New Beginnings.

The girls’ parents followed Aguilar “because he was their trusted spiritual leader,” which is how “he was able to move into their home and have access” to the victims, according to the warrants.

Aguilar, then 26, first assaulted the younger of the two victims in October 1996. The abuse continued with inappropriate touching at the home and at church.

In March 1997, shortly after moving to nearby Grapevine, Texas, Aguilar was having sex with the younger girl, then 12, in the family’s living room when he was caught by her parents. The parents, according to the arrest warrants, have given police a written statement saying that Aguilar admitted having sex with the girl.

The other warrant alleges that on Oct. 31, 1996, Aguilar entered into the older sister’s room and had sex with the then-13-year-old girl. He continued having sex with the girl until she was about 15, including in motels, a church van, a church bathroom and in public restrooms, police said.

Aguilar, according to the warrant, was asked to leave New Beginnings after a witness caught him kissing the girl.

In their closing arguments in June, prosecutors said that Aguilar pursued a pattern of sexually abusing minors that started 19 years ago, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“He started off by rubbing up against her, by touching her, and then if he sensed that everything wasn’t going to go right, he’d step back and ask, ‘Is everything all right?’ He would just check to make sure that he wouldn’t get arrested,” Tarrant County prosecutor Sheila Wynn told jurors.

The ROC, which Aguilar opened in 2001, was one of the area’s biggest churches, often drawing a few thousand people to its Saturday night services, before the pastor’s 2013 arrest.

That September, ROC leaders publicly announced that an internal investigation had uncovered numerous extramarital affairs.

The ROC, according to tax records, gave him $76,000 in severance and allowed him to live in the parsonage until the end of the year.

On the eve of its former pastor’s trial, the church on Midlothian Turnpike in South Richmond announced that it officially changed its name to Celebration Church and Outreach Ministry and that it had hired a minister experienced at turning around troubled churches.