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The author
Micael Grenholm, a Swedish charismactivist, apologist and author.
Rolland Baker Really Likes Fjords
Papa Rolland Baker of Iris Global has seen many amazing things in his life. His wife Heidi has been healed from MS, he has witnessed blind people seeing and deaf people hearing as they’ve ministered to the poor in Mozambique, and his ministry has led to the salvation of thousands of people. But when you look at his Facebook feed, you’ll find something else that totally captivates the heart of this man of God:
Rolland has recently been speaking in Norway, and while we Scandinavians tend to be more fascinated by palm trees and mangos, this Mozambician missionary thinks that mountains and lakes are the real deal:
And did I mention fjords? Rolland likes fjords.
His fascination is so great that he gets some romantic, although sadly not totally accurate, pictures of Norway:
God bless you, papa Rolland. We scandinavians might think that your country is 100 times more fascinating, but we appreciate your appreciation of the North. Now, keep us posted about the next exotic location you’re going to!
Heidi Baker and Iris Global – an Introduction
In May 1976, a 16-year-old girl called Heidi was kneeling at the altar of a small Pentecostal church at a Choctaw reservation site in Mississippi. She had been saved just two months earlier, and now she was astounded as she suddenly saw a white light coming over her while she heard a voice, audibly, that said “I am calling you to be a minister and a missionary. You are to go to Africa, Asia and England.”
Heidi married Rolland Baker, grandson to the great missionary H.A. Baker, and God took them on an amazing adventure across the world. Today they live in Mozambique and help thousands of orphaned children, planting thousands of churches and witnessing amazing miracles such as blind people seeing, deaf people hearing and dead people coming back to life. I’ve made a video about them and their organization Iris Global which you can watch below:
Heidi and Rolland have inspired me so much in my vision to combine miracles, evangelism and social justice, and I pray that they will continue to make an impact in Mozambique and all across the world for the glory of God.
Heidi and Rolland Baker’s Extremely Inspiring Christmas Greeting!
Praise God for Heidi and Rolland Baker! These wonderful missionaries in Mozambique are so passionate about the love of the Father, the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the miraculous power of the Holy Spirit, and their missionary organization Iris Global has experienced glorious revival for the last 20 years. Their Christmas greeting above was published a few days after Christmas (probably because of the amazingly beautiful editing) but who cares about that when the video is a masterpiece when it comes to inspiration, passion and faith?
Heidi shares how 2014 has been a challenge for Iris because of the horrible floods in Mozambique, but she is amazed by how God used countless radical disciples to serve, encourage and relieve the suffering population and bring the Gospel of hope and life. As I’ve written before on this blog, Iris experiences amazing miracles like the blind seeing and the deaf hearing while helping the poor and vulnerable with good, serious development assistance.
Since I’m a monthly donor to Iris I also got a physical Christmas greeting from the Bakers, this postcard with a nice worship CD. The reason they send their supporters worship music is so that their love for Jesus may increase, they say. I love it. They’re just great. God bless them!
Compelled by Love – Movie Review
This is my review of Compelled by Love, a new film about Heidi and Rolland Baker and their organization Iris Global. You can watch the movie for free until tomorrow at Bethel TV.
Wow, wow, wow. Compelled by Love is seriously one of the best films I’ve ever seen. It’s radical, passionate, moving, inspiring and awesome, it combines joyful happiness with serious pain and sorrow, and in the end I just sat in awe agreeing completely with Heidi Baker when she said that it’s all about Him – what this film portraits is nothing else than the life of Jesus today in one of the poorest nations in the world. It’s a film about an amazing missionary couple and their organization, yes, and for that very reason it is a film about Christ, because Christ is all they stand for in an amazing way.
The film is 100% Iris. It’s emotional. It’s beautiful. It’s messy. Some professional film makers would perhaps react to the patchwork-style; the film is chronological for only 30 minutes or so, and then holy anarachy is released with a multitude of different messages, themes and stories presented, some of which have already been published in YouTube clips. I love it! Shara Pradhan and her team simply takes the best Iris have directly from the field.
The Bethel and Iris culture (those ministries are basically “married” by now) talk a lot about honor, and this film truly wants to honor the life of Heidi and Rolland Baker. Bill Johnson is interviewed when he states that he simply knows no one who has constantly said “yes” to God the way Heidi has, and while she and Rolland are so extraordinary in that they always, continously, give everything to Him, their passion is multiplied to so many others that see that they are not superheroes but carrier of the divine presence of the Holy Spirit that are available for all of us. The film carefully emphasizes both sides of this paradox – the Bakers are amazing saints and should be recognized as such, but their gifts are not excluded to them but constantly multiplied to those who follow their example as they follow Christ. After all, it is the Mozambiqan bush pastors that have raised over 100 dead people within Iris, not the Bakers.
Compelled by Love: New Film about Iris Global Released Tonight
Compelled by Love Poster
Today is the world premiere of Compelled by Love, a brand new documentary about Iris Global or Iris Ministries, the missionary organization founded by Heidi and Rolland Baker that is spreading revival across Mozambique, Africa and the world. The film is narrated by Reinhard Bonnke and will cover how the blind see and the deaf hear, how poverty is beaten and burdens released, and how love, power and sacrifice is transforming thousands of people as they encounter God on the missions field.
The premiere will be in Bethel Church tonight at 6 PM, US Pacific Time, and thanks to Bethel TV you will be able to watch it online from then on and three days ahead! I can really recommend you to see this, I can’s wait myself. 🙂 If you want to pre-order the film and/or host a screening, go to Compelled by Love’s website.
Suffering, Worship and Glory: Iris Ministries in the Congo
Every now and then the amazing missionary organization Iris Global releases their video newsletters on Youtube. This week’s video covered their ministry in DR Congo, and I was just wrecked by it. So much pain. So much suffering. And yet so much love, dance and passionate worship. Not to speak about the amazing signs and wonders they experience.
I’ve written about Congo before, it’s a country the Lord has put on my heart. It began several years ago when I got so upset hearing about that our cell phones and computers have financed the devastating Congolese war that has killed 6 million people. Thousands of women have been raped, and every day aroung 1500 people die because of the malnutrition and diseases the war produces – half of them children. What does the Kingdom of Christ means in such a horrible situation?
Well, it means everything.
Worship at Iris Bukavu, DR Congo. Photo: Iris Global
The worship in the video above is amazing. The passion, the love, the zeal – it makes me breathless. Many of these people have experienced things that are unimaginable for me. And yet they do not question the goodness of God, instead they seek it more intensely.
Voices about Iris Ministries
On greatnonprofits.org, there are 31 reviews of the charismatic missionary organisation Iris Ministries, or Iris Global as they nowadays call themselves. Everyone have given five out of five stars. Here are some of the reviews:
Iris Global wholeheartedly beats with the heartbeat of God. They move to bring the love of Jesus to not just the poor, widowed, orphaned but also and always to the person that stands right in front of them. It’s incredible to see and organization recklessly abandoned to take the love of Christ to every single heart that they encounter, without a secret agenda but to solely love! The experience I had with Iris was life-changing, I can never be the same.
My life was personally transformed in immeasurable ways through Iris Global. Never had I been so powerfully and overwhelmingly loved. One thing is being personally changed by a non-profit, but another is witnessing the trustworthiness and reliance one can have in KNOWING so beautifully that every penny invested towards Iris’ work is exponentially having life-giving impacts to both individuals and corporate masses.
When I spent time in Mozambique with Iris ministries I saw the lives of many many precious children, mamas , papas, young men and young woman being changed daily! Not only did I witness a love that was so transcendent I found I was the one that was being blessed by These incredible villages full of transformed people living in poverty but having a richness that could not be added in dollars! I saw children with no hope being given a hope for the future! The work iris is doing worldwide is in my opinion some of the most important work of our lifetime! I believe that through the laid down love of the body of Christ serving with Iris Global we will see an end to world hunger in our life time! Hearts yielded to love.
Desperate Needs, Ultimate Joy: A Letter from Rolland Baker
Photo: Iris Ministries
This newsletter just came from Rolland Baker, founder of Iris Ministries.
Dear friends of Iris around the world,
We in Iris continue to face more need, challenge, opposition, helplessness and perplexity than we can bear, yet daily God shows up and we soldier on. We are jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us (2 Cor. 4:7). We often feel under great pressure, condemned to failure. But we have learned that this happens that we might not rely on ourselves, but on God, who raises the dead (2 Cor. 1:9).
We cannot overstate how much more help we need in every way. We need administrators, organizers, technicians, engineers, mechanics, builders, doctors, nurses, teachers, farmers, computer and Internet geeks, donors, etc., ad infinitum, along with every kind of spiritual gifting. The reason is that Iris is not simply a church, or a children’s center, or a relief effort, or a Bible school, or a mission training base, but all these and more as one example of an entire Kingdom environment. We exist to demonstrate an all-encompassing love that flows from God’s heart, a love that the unsaved have never seen before. We are here to seek and save the lost, and in the process give them a foretaste of heaven and our unshakeable inheritance that is to come.
We came to Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest countries, to prove the Gospel, both in our own hearts and lives and among the neediest people we could find. And the Gospel has taken root all around us. Churches are being added to our number weekly, mounting into the thousands. After so many years of cruel colonialism, communism and civil war, the overall climate of Mozambique has changed, deeply affected, we believe, by the Gospel. It has recently been voted one the most peaceful countries in Africa. Its economic growth rate is amazing. Major energy resources are being discovered.
Emergency: 140 000 Homeless in Mozambique Due to Floods
“The flood was causing vastly more than homelessness. Corpses were floating in the floodwaters. Helicopters rescued ten thousand people from treetops and roofs along the Limpopo River, but ninety thousand more were stranded and in immediate danger of being swept away and drowned. Most could not swim, but the current was so powerful and deep that even strong swimmers could not last long. Each day those trapped in tiny areas grew weaker from hunger and exposure. Small children were affected quickly by malnutrition, so they were rescued first, leaving their parents behind.
Those rescued were deposited in isolated areas, still wet and miserable and without food or services of any kind. Children were hungry, sick and crying, with high fevers, and left without mothers and fathers. International aid was on the way but greatly delayed by red tape, and it was far less than what was required. In this huge country with so many orphans and children in distress, there were pitifully limited facilities for taking care of them. In the Lord we tried to fill a vacuum among the neediest of them all.”
This is what missionary Rolland Baker writes in his book Always Enough (Chosen Books, 2003) about the devastating floods that hit Mozambique 13 years ago. His organization, Iris Ministries, did their best to alleviate suffering and save lives in the midst of disaster. In the book, he expresses the joy of seeing happiness returning to those who recieve the aid, but also the pain of knowing that there were many they didn’t were able to help. Today, he and the other Iris missionaries will have to experience this all over again.
Because of extremely heavy rain the last week, southern Mozambique has been struck with the largest flood disaster since 2000. UN OCHA reports that 250 000 are affected, of which 146,000 have to be housed in temporary shelters. These people are in desperate need. Katherine Mueller from the Red Cross says: The main needs are tents and clean water, but they basically need everything.”
Iris Relief has sent a team to the areas affected by the floods to bring humanitarian aid and the power and love of the Holy Spirit. Please support this, go here and scroll down to “Iris Relief: Responds to Mozambique Floodings”. Or you can give to World Food Programme, Unicef or some other organization that are active in the area. Thank you, and God bless you!
Revival on the Mount
The Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5-7) is a revival sermon. It wasn’t delievered in a cathedral to a bunch of silent church-goers, but in the midst of a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit where mighty miracles were occuring. Matthew describes how people came from far away in order to be blessed by the miraculous power that was flowing out from the hands of Jesus (4:23-25). I imagine the scenery as in the clip above, but even better. Every single one got healed: those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed. Revival fires were blazing!
A faith healer preaching enemy love
But when Jesus starts to preach, He doesn’t talk about “the anointing”, “open heavens”, “glory invasion” or some other Charismatic cliche. He talks about Kingdom lifestyle and holiness: doing good deeds, loving enemies, giving to the needy, fasting, praying, not storing treasures on earth, not judging people, doing to others what you would have them do to you, and so on. As I’ve written in a previous blog post, it is unfortunately unusal in many parts of the church today that faith healers speak about enemy love and denouncing wealth, or that Christian activists conduct healing crusades.
This is a shame, because I am convinced that not only does the Sermon on the Mount contain instructions for living an activist life that makes the world a better place, it is also a key for Charismatic breakthrough. Immediately after Jesus has delivered His sermon, He heals a guy with leprosy (8:1-4), then a paralyzed boy (vv. 5-13), and after that a whole group of sick and possessed people (vv. 14-17). Directly after stating that the Father will give us good gifts when we ask for it, He tells us to do to others as we would have them do to us (7:9-12). The gifts of the Spirit are given by grace, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive for holiness. On the contrary, if we do not act according to the commands of Jesus, our spiritual house may fall “with a great crash” (7:24-27).
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