Iris Ministries, Inc.

Heidi Baker was born and raised in Laguna Beach, California. At sixteen she was led to the Lord by a Navajo preacher while working at a Choctaw reservation with the American Field Service. Her experience of conversion was a radical one; a few months later she was taken into an open vision for several hours, in which the Lord spoke with her and told her that she would be a minister and a missionary to Africa, Asia, and England. When she returned to Laguna Beach she began to minister at every opportunity, leading short-term mission teams and enrolling in Southern California College (now Vanguard University) in preparation for going overseas.

Rolland Baker was born in Kunming, in China’s Yunnan province, the son of American missionaries. Raised until the age of eighteen in China and Taiwan, he is a third-generation missionary on both his father’s and mother’s side. From childhood he was enormously influenced by his grandfather, Harold A. Baker, who had written “Visions Beyond the Veil”, an account of the extended visions of heaven and hell that his rescued Chinese children had received at the Adullam orphanage in southwest China during the early 1930s. Later, he was also greatly influenced by Mel Tari’s account of revival in Indonesia, as told in the book “Like a Mighty Wind.” After coming to the United States to attend university, he had a strong desire to pursue a ministry in which the same kind of supernatural signs and wonders could flow freely. He met Heidi in a small charismatic church in Southern California, while she was attending Southern California College. Six months later they were married, united in their desire and calling to seek an extreme outpouring of the Holy Spirit among the desperate, the poor and the lost in the unevangelized world.

Rolland and Heidi founded Iris Ministries together in 1980, at first leading dance-drama outreaches in the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia and Hong Kong. They were ordained as ministers in 1985, upon completion of B.A. and M.A. degrees in Biblical Studies and Church Leadership. They then moved to Indonesia and eventually to Hong Kong, planting churches and working predominantly in the poorest slums with drug addicts, gang members, street sleepers and the very elderly.

In 1992, after more than a decade of living and ministering in Southeast Asia, they moved to England to begin doctoral studies in Systematic Theology at the University of London. While studying they served as head pastors of the Believer’s Centre church, and continued to minister extensively among the homeless. Heidi Baker completed her PhD. in 1995. Later that year Rolland and Heidi relocated to Mozambique, along with their children, Crystalyn and Elisha.

Rolland and Heidi remained in Mozambique’s capital city of Maputo for nearly a decade, establishing several permanent children’s centers and a network of churches. In 2004 they moved to the northern coastal city of Pemba, where they currently reside. In addition to serving as the directors of Iris Ministries, Rolland and Heidi now itinerate worldwide, speaking at events and outreaches hosted by a wide variety of Christian denominations. While at home, they teach regularly at the Harvest Missions School, as well as leading frequent outreaches by truck, boat, and plane through Mozambique’s remote bush country, ministering to the Mozambican church and preaching the gospel to the remaining unreached villages of the north.