‘He said I want to go home’: Rev Kathy Kiuna recounts Bishop Allan Kiuna’s painful final moments

As she addressed the congregation at the church’s headquarters in Parklands, Rev Kiuna thanked everyone for their overwhelming support and went ahead to explain how she and her family had hoped he would make it through his illness, however the Bishop knew his time had come and said he wanted “to go home”.

“When my best friend got to the end of the road, he kept saying, I want to go home. We kept countering it, refusing, rejecting it with everything in us. And when he'd say, ‘I want to get home’, we would say, no. He'd say, no. Stop,” Rev Kiuna said.

She continued to describe how she and her family tried to convince him that he was already home,  but he wanted to go to be with the Lord in heaven.

“We would say, you're already home, you don't need to say such things. And then he would say, they are coming (the angels)… We would say, chase them away. We would tell them, go back. Why are you coming? Go back. And I couldn't imagine life without him,” Rev Kiuna said.

She went ahead to say that she thought that if there was anyone who was going to die, then it would be her because it is the Bishop who had the vision for JCC, not her.

“God, you have such a sense of humor. I thought you'd rather take me and keep him. Because he has the vision. He knows where we are going. He knows all these I go back to the scripture I'm standing on. 2 Chronicles 20:12,” Rev Kiuna said.

The verse says: “O our God, will you not execute judgment on them? For we are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

She said she does not know what direction the church would take, but is leaning on the verse.

A few weeks before Bishop Kiuna’s passing, during a women’s conference, Kathy had said that she had never imagined that she would go through the difficult time she was going through at the time, being the caregiver of her husband.

She said she was leaning on her faith to go through the season.

Bishop Kiuna and Rev Kathy Kiuna started their church from humble beginnings and they grew it to become a mega-church.

Bishop Kiuna died at the age of 57 years.