DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
ISAAC WEKESA SIMIYU
“Bishop Isaac”
25 January 1955 – 6 November 2026
Pentecostal bishop who planted twelve churches and fed Bungoma's widows
With humility and faith in the Lord we announce the call home of Bishop ISAAC WEKESA SIMIYU, Founder and Presiding Bishop of Glory Harvest Pentecostal Assemblies, on 6th November 2026 at Bungoma County Referral Hospital. Husband to Pastor Beatrice Nafula; father to Daniel, Ruth, Joseph and others; father-in-law to many; grandfather to eighteen. Family and friends meet daily at the church compound, Kanduyi, at 5.00 pm. Cortege leaves Bungoma Funeral Home on Friday 27th November for a funeral service at Glory Harvest Main Sanctuary, then interment in the church grounds. M-Pesa Paybill 355902, Account BISHOP. Well done, good and faithful servant.
Bishop Isaac Wekesa Simiyu said he heard the call to ministry while weighing sugarcane. He was a clerk at the Nzoia Sugar weighbridge in 1988 when a stranger told him that his scales were fair but his heart was elsewhere. Within a year he had resigned, borrowed a plastic tent and begun preaching at the Bungoma market, and within thirty years that tent had become Glory Harvest Pentecostal Assemblies, a network of twelve churches across Western Kenya.
He was born in Kimilili in 1955, the fourth of eleven children of a maize farmer. He studied at Kimilili Secondary, trained at a Bible college in Nairobi on weekends, and married Beatrice Nafula in 1982. She became his co-pastor, and together they raised six children in the church compound at Kanduyi, sharing it with whoever arrived hungry.
What Bungoma remembers is his kitchen. Every Wednesday he fed forty widows from a cauldron of ugali and sukuma wiki, and he insisted that the cooks sit down and eat first. He paid school fees for orphans, built a clinic extension for the church dispensary and led a famous peace walk between rival villages during the 2007 troubles.
Bishop Isaac loved Luhya gospel guitar, boiled sweet potatoes at dawn and a good argument about Bible translation. His sermons were short and his prayers were long. He suffered a stroke in October and died at Bungoma County Referral Hospital on 6 November 2026, with his family singing beside him.
He leaves his wife, Pastor Beatrice, six children, eighteen grandchildren and a congregation of thousands.
“Hunger has no denomination.”