The pastor of Christ United Methodist Church said he takes issue with comments made by Tim Hershey in a recent story in The Citizen. Hershey, who was helping to operate the Our Daily Bread soup kitchen at the church said that church officials didn’t want to open the food kitchen back to five days a week.

Pastor Carlos Otero, the minister at Christ United Methodist Church, said Hershey’s comments were not true.

“We are open now three days a week and we are constantly reevaluating our situation here at Our Daily Bread,” Otero said. “Mr. Hershey is wrong to insinuate that we don’t want to feed people hot meals at our food kitchen. We have the help of several churches and the public has helped. But we have to be sustainable and if we find we can open five days a week again, we certainly will.”

Hershey said in the story that he is opening his own food kitchen at the Towers Ministries Church on Joel Blvd., in the building that once was the Lehigh Auditorium and later a restaurant. Now a church uses the building for services.

Otero said nobody should think or believe that his church wants to shut down Our Daily Bread.

“We’re just not going to do that,” he said. “But we have to look at the money situation, the food situation and whether we have enough volunteers to work it. We plan to keep it open and if we can, resume the number of days of the week that we are open.”