Jeanne DamasioAug 31, 2026, 3:26 PM
Pastor Daniel Herrera Jerez records a 10-minute study of a Bible lesson and posts it every day. His YouTube channel carries 223,184 subscribers, and in its most recent month it drew 1.3 million views and more than 177,000 hours of watch time, according to figures he shared from the channel’s analytics. For the first eight years, he had no clear idea that anyone beyond his own contacts was listening.
Then a listener in Belgium wrote to say the lesson was reaching her too late in the day. He had been posting each morning, which was her afternoon.
Herrera asked where she lived. He found listeners in Argentina, Peru, the United States, and Colombia. The recording had traveled for years while he assumed he was speaking to the people he knew.
Nineteen years ago Herrera was pastor of the church in zona 15, in Guatemala City. A Christian radio station, Unión Radio, stood next door.
Walking past one day, he was invited by the director to present the station’s review of the Bible School lesson, the weekly Bible study held on Saturdays. The director’s only condition was that he never miss a broadcast.
Herrera accepted. The brief was specific. It was for listeners who were not already in the pews, 10 minutes a day, Sunday through Friday. What he wanted was for the study to reach people without formal Bible training, and he retold it in the language they used.
His mother asked to hear it. His children converted the recordings to MP3, and he began sending them out. Then he built the WhatsApp group, and the ministry took his own name.
Herrera’s children pushed him toward YouTube, where the study stayed in audio until a friend suggested he put it on video. By the time the pandemic came, he had been making it for about 12 years.
The channel grew quickly, and the WhatsApp groups fed it. For every 100 viewers, 60 are women and 40 are men, according to the channel’s own analytics, and 85 percent of those women are over 55.
Herrera records and uploads the files, and a paid editor handles the rest. He gives the channel about three hours a week, and the channel, he says, earns enough to cover those salaries. Alongside it, he plans urban evangelism projects and preaches abroad several times a year.
“He began a self-supporting ministry that has allowed him to dedicate himself fully to sharing the gospel online, reaching a significant audience through social media,” said Abel Márquez, communication director of the Inter-American Division and executive director of Hope Channel Inter-America.
One of those trips took him to Queens, New York. A tall man came to the meetings, sat at the back and stayed after the room emptied. He had traveled two or three hours to be there. He told Herrera he had been in serious trouble and had thought about ending his life, and that a video had come up in his car, one clip leading to another until it was Herrera’s. He kept listening, and decided to look for God. He had come to say thank you.
That night the host church took his details.
On the morning of August 10, Herrera and his wife were having breakfast in their apartment in Edificio Bachué, in Pereira, when an earthquake alert sounded on his phone. A magnitude 7.4 quake had struck near San José del Palmar, in the Chocó department, at 7:34 a.m. local time. Pereira was among the hardest hit cities.
Though evacuating from the fifth floor, they never fell, Herrera said, and they could hear the building coming apart around them. Neighbors came out of their apartments in panic, but he and his wife went down calling out that they were going to get out and that the Lord would go with them. People joined them on the stairs at the sound of it.
The ground floor gave way at the walls, and the columns held. The building was left unsafe to enter.
They stayed in the street, got the cars out, found tables and chairs and food, and spent the night in the vehicle. Herrera says the neighbors showed enormous solidarity, and that in the middle of it they talked together about Jesus and what the Bible says of his return.
Everything the couple owns is still inside the building. He says that is not what concerns him.
The next day he turned 62, the retirement age for men in Colombia. The money he had saved was going to pay for the apartment he can no longer enter.
“The greatest gift of this life is the life God gives us,” he said. “We received the greatest gift, my wife and I, a new chance to live. I feel we were born again.”
Márquez has been watching him since the earthquake. “What especially encourages me is seeing his attitude after the earthquake and the loss of his home,” he said. “Rather than allowing those circumstances to define him or focusing on what he has lost, he continues with a positive spirit and a strong commitment to sharing hope. His determination to keep using technology to reach people with the message of Jesus, even in the midst of his own challenges, is inspiring.”
The couple drove 14 hours to Bucaramanga, to their son’s apartment, and the preaching schedule did not change. He is due in Guatemala, Venezuela, New Jersey, San Francisco, and Orlando before the year ends.
What the earthquake changed, Herrera says, is the urgency. Many people died in that city without knowing Jesus, and he has been asking himself how far his own responsibility reaches. His conclusion is a question about method, how to preach faster and in a louder voice.
Credit for all photos: Courtesy of Daniel Herrera.
