Heart After God Ministries Erin and Rory Wolff

We would also like to Praise God for the great impact that other ministries and people have had on our lives and on our spiritual walk…

Rolland and Heidi Baker (Iris Ministries)

With her husband Rolland, Heidi founded IRIS Ministries in 1980, a non-profit Christian ministry dedicated to Jesus and service, especially among the poor. After twelve years ministering in Asia, they left in 1992. In 1995 they started a new ministry to the poor and homeless children in Mozambique. Beginning with nothing, within a matter of months they were given a dilapidated orphanage in Maputo with 80 children. From there, the ministry has expanded to include well-drilling, free health clinics that service the poor and sick, feeding programs, primary and secondary schools, cottage industries and 5,000 churches in Mozambique and a total of over 8,000 churches in over 20 nations.

Their ministry is known for its reports of miracles, and in September 2010 the Southern Medical Journal published an article presenting evidence of “significant improvements” in auditory and visual function among subjects exhibiting impairment before receiving prayer from the ministry.

Originally from Southern California, the Bakers are now based full-time in Pemba, Mozambique. They also travel to various places around the world to share their story, and to teach about God’s love and what love in action looks like. The core value and message of the Baker’s ministry is God’s love. Rolland Baker is the grandson of missionary H.A. Baker.” (Heidi Baker-Wikipedia-The Free Encyclopedia) “I was greatly influenced by my grandfather, H. A. Baker, who wrote “Visions Beyond the Veil,” an account of the extended visions of heaven and hell that children received in his remote orphanage in southwest China two generations ago.

Heidi was powerfully called to the mission field at age sixteen when she was living on an Indian reservation in Mississippi as an American Field Service student. Several months after she was led to Jesus by a Navajo evangelist, she was taken up in a vision for several hours and heard Jesus speak audibly to her and tell her to be a minister and a missionary to Asia, England, and Africa. When she returned home to Laguna Beach, California, she began ministering at every opportunity and leading short-term missions teams. We met at a small charismatic church in Dana Point, and got married six months later after realizing we had the same radical desire to see revival among the poor and forgotten of the world.

We spent our first six years together leading evangelistic dance-drama teams all over Asia, making use of our backgrounds in creative media and the performing arts. But we increasingly came into intimate contact with the desperately poor, and could no longer be satisfied by large meetings and quick visits to various locations, even though thousands were coming to Jesus. We had to learn to come to a stop and take care of long-term needs, one person at a time.

We began by working with the poor in the slums of central Jakarta, Indonesia, and then among the forgotten street-sleepers and elderly in the most crowded urban area in the world, central Kowloon in Hong Kong. Jackie Pullinger’s work among drug addicts in the Walled City was a major influence in our lives.

For years we longed to get to Africa in fulfillment of our calling to prove the Gospel in the most challenging situation we could find. We wanted to see a continuation of “Visions Beyond the Veil,” and believed with my grandfather that the most likely place to see such revival again was among the most unlikely! So we were drawn to Mozambique, officially listed at the time as the poorest country in the world.

A few days into my initial visit to Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, I was offered an orphanage that no one could or would support, not even large churches in South Africa or European donor nations. It was horribly neglected and dilapidated, with eighty miserable, demon-afflicted orphans in rags. I thought it was a perfect test of the Sermon on the Mount. Our Father in heaven knows what we need. Seek first His Kingdom and righteousness, and these things will be ours as well… Take no thought for tomorrow. Why worry? Jesus is enough for us, for anyone.

Alone and without support, Heidi and I offered to take over the center and provide for the children in return for the opportunity to bring the Gospel to them. Within months the children were saved and filled with the Holy Spirit, weeping while still in rags with gratitude for their salvation. Jesus provided miraculously, more all the time as our children prayed night and day for their daily food. We brought in teams, improved the center, and took our children to the streets to testify to more orphaned and abandoned children. Some were lost in visions, taken to heaven and dancing around the throne of God on the shoulders of angels.

But abruptly, after we got up to 320 children, the government evicted us and denied our children permission to pray and worship on our property. Totally without a back-up plan, our children marched off the property barefoot without a home. We lost everything. We also lost tremendous amounts of support because we welcomed the increasing Presence of the Holy Spirit in our meetings.

But we were only beginning to taste the power of God in Mozambique. Land was donated by a nearby city. We got tents and food from South Africa. Provision came in from supernaturally touched hearts all over the world. Soon we could actually build our own dorms. Bush pastors longed for a Bible school, and to receive what our children had received from the Holy Spirit. Graduates went out and began healing the sick and raising the dead. Church growth in the bush exploded.

Then revival was fueled exponentially by the desperation caused by catastrophic flooding in 2000 when three cyclones came together and brought torrential rain for forty days and nights. More damage was caused by that flood than Mozambique’s many years of civil war. A cry for God rose up like we had never experienced or imagined, and our churches across the country multiplied into thousands. God provided a bush airplane, which we used constantly to spread the Gospel through remote “bush conferences” at dirt airstrips in every province.

Now we have networks of churches and church-based orphan care in all ten provinces in Mozambique in addition to our bases in main cities. In recent years Heidi and I have concentrated on the Makua, a people group of four million in the north who were listed by missiologists as “unreached and unreachable.” With tremendous help from missionaries and nationals, around two thousand churches have been planted among these people in the last eight years.

Each year thousand of visitors come to help us at our various bases, and we have a missions school in Pemba that offers something special to us: missions training on the mission field! Here we combine teaching, worship and spiritual impartation with everyday application to ministry among children and the poorest of the poor, both in towns and in the remote villages of the African bush.” (http://www.irisglobal.org/about)

“The entire Bible is written about people that were extraordinary or unusually excellent and who deserve our attention because of being wonderfully different, and the Bible is also written about people who were the complete opposite, people who did everything, but bring glory to God. I believe God did that purposely so that we could study those people’s lives and have an example on how to live and how not to live. Out of the extraordinary men and women that the Bible talks about, they all have four things in common.

The first is that they all had their faults, from adultery, like David, to pride like Joseph. We all fall short of the glory of God-we all sin.

The second is that they all went through trials as God perfected them, matured them, and refined them; like Moses in the desert, to Jonah in the belly of the fish. These men and women were no different than any other human in the world in the fact that they still had sin in their lives and they still needed to be made more mature in God so that God could trust them with His works…

The third thing that these men and women have in common is that the men and women loved God, no matter their faults, with their whole hearts. They were all willing to give up everything for the God that they loved. Including, disobeying a law that went against God, knowing that the punishment was that they would be thrown into a fire or into a den of lions…

And the forth reason is, that because these people allowed God to refine them, and because of their great love for God, God was then able to use them in incredible ways to glorify Him. Using them to save entire nations, to heal the sick, and raise the dead. And the blessings on these people’s lives were more than most can imagine.” (Taken from “A Heart After God” by Erin Wolff Chapter 1 Jacob Vs. Esau Desire God More Than All Things)

We can learn from the people mentioned in the Bible and we can also learn from men and women who have lived since the days of the Bible; the men and women of faith who, although have had and do have their faults, have loved God with their whole hearts and have been used greatly by God. They have been used not only because of their great love for God, but also because of their hunger and their willingness. “…God is not a respecter of persons.” Acts 10:34 KJV God wants to do the very same things in your life and through your life that He did in the lives of the men and women in the Bible and also since that time.

Look to God for who He is, not to man!