When he was called to serve a bilingual church in a neighborhood with a visible unhoused population, Hierald Osorto initially resisted. He had imagined leading a more affluent English-speaking congregation, and as a Latino pastor, he worried about being pigeonholed.

The son of an immigrant who fled El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, Hierald grew up attending a Spanish-speaking Pentecostal church in Newark, New Jersey. “It was never quite the easiest,” he says of the poverty and injustice that surrounded him. “But the community always showed up for one another. And it was always done, they said, because ‘we believe in God, and this is what our calling should be.’”

He saw that same spirit when he visited San Pablo, and came aboard in 2021. Continue reading Hierald Osorto