Community Partner Feature: Pastor Gustavo Diaz What is your current professional role? Please tell us a little bit about Capilla del Rey. I am the administrative pastor at Capilla del Rey. I manage the day-to-day operations of the church in order for our senior pastor to have time to devote to prayer, scripture and ministering to our congregation. At Capilla del Rey we always tell people that we are a church for the whole family and we live by that. Our children’s, youth’s, men’s, and women’s ministries all work in tandem to minister to the family as a unit. We strive to bring families closer together by bringing them closer to Christ as we minister to their individual needs. As pastors, preachers, and Sunday school teachers, we are trained to minister to our community’s spiritual and emotional needs, but we realize that our community also has physical needs. As we strive to make people spiritually healthy, we also want them to be physically healthy. That is why we are so happy to partner with UM every year for the health fair. The service UM provides for our community is so important. Every year we hear from people that they had never been to a dermatologist, gotten screened for cancer, or spoken to a mental health professional until they got that care at the UM health fair. One would think that because we are in Kendall, everyone is affluent and well taken care of, but the truth is that the need in our community is great. Right up until the COVID-19 pandemic we hosted a cafeteria for elderly folk. One hundred elderly people coming here everyday to socialize and eat lunch. For many of them that was their only healthy meal of the day. For others it was the only time they ever got to leave their house or even speak to anyone outside their household. How was your experience as the key community partner for the West Kendall Health Fair? We love hosting the West Kendall Health Fair. We have hosted the fair for three years now and it has been a wonderful experience. The students that organize the event are kind, understanding of our limitations, and so hard working that it is honestly a joy to work with them. We are forever grateful to Dr. Andres Lopez, a member of our church and UM Miller School of Medicine graduate who is the person that originally contacted us about hosting the West Kendall Health Fair.
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