DELIVERANCE CHURCH UGANDA

John Yawe, the Pastor of Mbarara Deliverance Church, is set for great things….

My name is John Yawe. I locally work with Deliverance Church in Mbarara but I also oversee the work of Deliverance Church in the South West and Western Region. I came to Mbarara in 1991 at the prompting of the Lord after having earlier been in Fort Portal where I had been a church pastor and got involved in evangelism and church planting in the surrounding villages. I then started working actively with young people in Mbarara University for whom I felt a passion to mentor. I shared those promptings with the leadership of the Deliverance Church Ministry because they were responsible for my being in Fort Portal. They had recognized the call of God on my life and had prayed me there but they obeyed God and prayerfully released me to come to Mbarara.

Thus I joined Hannington Male in overseeing the work of Deliverance Church in Western and South Western Uganda although my main mission was to reach out to the Mbarara University student community. Incidentally, this was a time when the team was responding to God’s instruction to raise young leaders and mentor them. In those days, the people in Mbarara were less receptive than they are now. The district had a stronghold of religion. There were not many Pentecostal churches then and if you talked about Jesus from a point of view that was not synonymous with the mainstream Christian religion, people shunned you. We actually faced the greatest opposition from the mainstream Christian church.

Rather than antagonize them, however, our aim was to preach the gospel, which we did in various institutions around.  Our main area of operation was Mbarara University. In fact, many doctors have gone through our hands in the years that have gone by. We held church services in Kakyeka and also started a house group (Community Unit) in Kakoba. Initially the people in Kakoba had to go to Kakyeka on Sunday, but as the numbers in Kakoba increased, I found it necessary to start a church there. For the first couple of months we held combined services there, to encourage the young church. Unfortunately for us, this is about the time Pastor Niwe disagreed with the national leadership of Deliverance Church for personal reasons and the mother church in Mbarara broke away with him. But personally, I have always enjoyed to work under the supervision of the larger body, and as a team, so I had no problems with Deliverance Church Uganda and I decided to stay on and look after the young church.