A former church employee was sentenced Monday to three years to serve for five convictions for taking indecent liberties with a minor.

Elizabeth Lee Beckett, now 23, will spend three years in jail for molesting the teenage boy she was entrusted with supervising.

The sentencing guidelines call for only three to six months, but prosecutor Nicole Belote argued for more.

“I asked for years,” she said. “I didn’t feel like months were appropriate. I just went into the circumstances I didn’t believe the guidelines took into account.”

Beckett and the victim’s family first met when they all lived in Iowa and attended church together. That’s when Beckett began babysitting for the family. The victim’s family later moved to Suffolk. Beckett began going to college in Florida, but was unhappy there and wound up moving to Suffolk to live with the family.

She took a position at Bethel Temple Assembly of God in Hampton.

When she was 20 and the boy was 13, the molestations began. It started with cuddling and progressed to oral sex, which happened about 25 times, Belote said. The fondling happened approximately 100 times.

The incidents continued for about two years. The teen told his father in October 2011 by text message, which kicked off the investigation.

In addition to three years to serve, the woman will serve five years of supervised probation, which will include sex offender treatment and counseling, no contact with the victim or his family and other standard conditions.

The suspended sentence is more than 10 years.