Kimaka Faith Fellowship Ministries International with its headquarters in Jinja City pushed this year’s Easter service up early: doors open for worship from 7:30 a.m., Zambian-born Rev. Maggie Chimbila, led a team whose voices lifted over keyboard and drum like they had already seen the stone rolled away.
The worship and praise team or choir did not just perform; it convened joy and put everyone in worship mood and mode. Around them, a slum neighborhood woke to ‘alleluias’ that refused gloom.
Unlike other churches with a kind of laissez-fare, the Kimaka-based Pentecostal church has a dress code, unwritten but exact and his Easter Sunday just kept it.
Women came in Sunday best, some in gomesi, some in dresses they ironed the night before with matching shoes and hand bags and there were toddlers so neat you knew without being told where they were headed.
In that often dusty but now muddy crowded stretch of the Jinja-Budondo road, clothing became testimony: resurrection has manners and morning plans.
Rev. Chimbila shaped it all with warmth, cheekbones high when she smiled, runs precise but not fussy — the kind of beauty that steadies rows. They celebrated because grief had already had its week; this was the backyard feast after the tomb.
Medium‑height and striking, Rev. Maggie Chimbila (fondly referred to as Prophetess) stood in a maroon kitenge that made the front rows sit up.
She led praise like she meant it, then gave it flesh with her heartfelt testimony: seventeen Easters back, after seven childless years, she delivered a baby on Resurrection Sunday.
They named her Promise; she’s now in Senior 4 at St. James SS. Two siblings followed. “Today Jesus is doing one‑on‑one,” Chimbila said, and went on to pair the empty tomb with whatever in the room looked barren — wallets, wombs, marriages, permits.
In Kimaka’s packed sanctuary, that arithmetic lands. Resurrection is not an idea or ideology or a theological jargon; it is a midwife.
Just after 10 am, when a morning drizzle released the latecomers, Mrs. Victor Muwanga stepped in for Leadership Class.
Pastor Victor, often called the Queen is Overseer Archbishop Daniel Muwanga’s wife and she framed the Sunday as a briefing session for shepherds addressing the question of soul, spirit and body with special pressure on the mental state.
Her point was clear and concrete-a pastor running on fumes and endless debts and stupid loans can not and should be trusted to feed God’s flock on green pasture.
Congregations in neighborhoods like Kimaka may ask for salt, soap, school fees or even charcoal and school fees, but Victor Muwanga pushed for a spiritually attentive, physically rested and she said it plainly that financially stable pastor is the best.
Wearing a pastoral and motherly demeanor but punctuated with some tough tones for purpose of emphasis and seriousness, Víctor warned against the complacency she often sees in some pastors.
Some pastors, she said skip sleep, eat poorly, dress recklessly and are physically confused wobbling like flat tyres, treating such steps as unspiritual.
She urged the audience which included couples and youth to take deliberate fitness and wellness walks, rests, runs, actual balanced meals saying agility is not vanity but readiness.
A slum parish or church never sleeps with emergency calls often as late as 2am or funerals at dawn and prayer requests at 6am.Pastors who ignore bodies, she said, soon mis-read and mislead souls, so eat, sleep, move then counsel.
Those earlier hours were curtain‑raisers — John‑the‑Baptist work, clearing ground. Then Archbishop Daniel Muwanga bounded to the pulpit under the heme: “Resurrection Chapter,” text rolling from Matthew 27:45.
He preached it like a timeline with stakes: annunciation, birth, ministry, arrest, cross, then Sunday. “Founders of other faiths died and were remembered,” he said. “Ours died and is active today.” In that packed Kimaka sanctuary, it sounded less like apologetics than neighborhood reportage: the One you pray to is alive, which changes situations, the one who gives knowledge and wisdom, the truth and the way”.
Archbishop Muwanga in a three-piece navy, dark brown leathers shined to a dull slum-light gleam, white handkerchief sharp in the breast pocket.
He made it clear that even three years with Jesus and the 12 disciples took off when pressure rose with the arrest and eventual crucifixion of their master Jesus Christ.
Bishop Muwanga said even resurrection news did not flush them from hiding and ironically the first announcers were women and the very powers that tortured him.
“That is us now, we are loyal in light, absent in shadow”, he said and landed it in marriages in Uganda where some couples stick now before socio-economic or health challenges set in.
On the torn curtain, Muwanga said there was no more need for a broker or reservation desk. He said the temple’s “keep out” veil rips top-to-bottom and every widow, orphan, race and color get direct aisle access to God through prayer, meditation and fasting.
“We now approach God the way we approach our neighbors here with open hands, present need with no costume or go-between…just the way we are and God answers”, he stressed.
However midway through the sermon, Archbishop Muwanga’s foot almost slipped near the pulpit leaving heads to snap. “Jesus” some shouted, others held their breath while a few of the choir team rushed in a kind of rescue mission.
He later found his footing back and he continued preaching without losing coordination. Afterward some members of the congregation were heard joking that “the Archbishop’s F36 jet was targeted by a ballistic missile but he took a flight plan”, a thumb-in-the-eye reference to the Tehran-Tel Aviv war theatrics.
Archbishop Muwanga used the pulpit to wish everyone the kind of Easter that many men and women of God have testified, school fees paid, rent met, diseases healed and families reconciled as citizens work towards a peaceful co-existence.
