If there is ever a competition for the title of Busiest Minister in America, the smart money will be on Yoan Mora, senior pastor of Primera Iglesia Cristiana, a small but vibrant Spanish-speaking congregation in San Antonio, Texas. The weeks are nuts: worship services, classes, and meetings on Sundays; a radio program on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; prayer service and Bible study on Tuesdays; house church meetings in the southern reaches of the city each Thursday; a job-training program hosted at the church on Saturdays, plus other meetings scattered through the weekend.<\/p>\n
Those are just his top-level duties. He still has to find time to write sermons, oversee church-building maintenance, teach small groups, manage budgets, and, most of all, be with people in all the ways pastors need to be with people: births, deaths, sicknesses, celebrations, life events big, medium, and small. Being a pastor is a full-time job, and then some.<\/p>\n
But being a pastor is not Mora\u2019s full-time job. Most of Mora\u2019s weekday hours are devoted to his work as an accountant at a health-care clinic in the northeast part of town. He\u2019s also trying to finish a master\u2019s degree in theology.<\/p>\n
Mora believes he was placed on this earth to pastor, so that\u2019s what he plans on doing. But for now, he can\u2019t make a living as a pastor because the congregation he serves is in an extremely low-income neighborhood. Pastor salaries are drawn from church budgets, which are drawn from the household budgets of congregants. So in a low-income area, even when a church grows, its budget does not expand so much as stretch. Primera Iglesia Cristiana can\u2019t pay Mora much for all his efforts, so for the foreseeable future, he\u2019ll hustle.<\/p>\n