Heidi Baker at 16 was a self-confessed introvert – a very different person from the renowned missionary who now is “Mama Heidi” to the thousands of children in Africa that her Iris Global ministry serves.

She was also severely dyslexic.

And yet, as a teenager she had the gumption to apply to be an American Field Service student while many of her peers were lounging on the shores of their Laguna Beach hometown by day and partying by night in the post-Watergate years of the mid-1970s.

Baker was promptly sent out to a Choctaw Indian reservation in Mississippi.

There, she was exposed to an environment of poverty she had never seen before. It was also there that she, a white girl among 500 American Indians, heard the Gospel for the first time from a Navajo preacher in a Baptist church.

“I remember just being undone,” she told the WOW! conference audience of some 1,000 women earlier this month (September).

Although she did not want to attract attention to herself in a place where she already felt different and awkward, as the worship song “Just as I am” was sung a total of nine times to encourage people to respond to the altar call, Baker stepped forward.

She was the only one.

“I began to experience the power of God in this little life of mine,” Heidi Baker told the WOW! conference audience of some 1,000 women from across 16 countries gathered at Cornerstone Community Church in September.

“The preacher must have thought he had a terrible night – like, just one white girl? That’s it?

“What’s going on with the ministry? What happened?” Baker said with a laugh.

Thus it was on March 13, 1976 that Baker was saved. A day later, she was water-baptised in a bathtub and filled with the power of the Holy Ghost.

“I began to experience the power of God in this little life of mine.”

A heavenly encounter

The teenager went on a five-day fast two months later and found herself drawn to the altar in a small Pentecostal church.

As she knelt down and lifted her arms to God, she was taken to a heavenly place. She saw God’s glory enveloping her in brilliant white light.

“Though the pianos were playing loudly and the pastor was preaching in a powerful voice, I couldn’t hear anything except the voice of God. It was the first and only time in my life that I heard the external, audible voice of God,” Baker said.

“Go to Africa, Asia and England. You are called to be a minister and a missionary,” He told her.

She thought: “How could I be a minister? I am a woman – a woman who was also a little ballerina who danced in a professional ballet company.”

Jesus kissed her hand, and she felt warm oil running down her arm. Overcome with love for Him, she knew she would go anywhere and do anything for Him.

“Yes, Lord, hineni (Hebrew for “here I am”),” came her answer.

Born again, Baker’s response to God’s call, again and again, was: “Hineni (Hebrew for ‘Here I am’), Lord.”

With that, Baker found her life inexplicably tinged with the supernatural.

She recounted being on the road ­­when she noticed two tornadoes approaching. Although born again just a few days before, she rebuked them in the name of Jesus and the tornadoes turned around.

In another instance, she put her hand on her car’s gas tank that she had noticed was running low. “I said, ‘Fill, fill, fill’ – and the gas came into the tank,” she related, matter-of-factly.

Still dyslexic

She told the gathering, however, that these experiences did not diminish the magnitude of the challenges that continued to confront her.

Held at Cornerstone Community Church, WOW! was birthed out of a passion to see women arise and fulfil their Kingdom identity, role and purpose. Other speakers alongside Baker were evangelist Suzette Hattingh, pastor Bonnie Chavda and Rev Dr Naomi Dowdy.

Baker detailed how, being dyslexic, she could not read.

She tried to hide her disability by expressing herself in dance. She could do triple pirouettes and leap in the air, but she could not understand words on a page.

“If I tried to read, it would just hurt my head. My brain was totally messed up and confused, given the severe dyslexia that I had. And the frustration that it built up inside of me was just insane,” she shared.

Fortunately, the people in church were kind and did not shame her. They told her not to worry as they had Bible tapes that she could listen to. She wore out set after set of New Testament tapes.

“I am still an aural learner. I still listen to the Bible on my phone.”

“You’re on the page!”

As she tried to work around her disability and get to know Him, God met her where she was.

Once, she went to a large healing event anchored by the American preacher, Kenneth Hagin, and was seated in the front row next to a piano player named Glenda.

“I had a huge black Bible. It was my prop. I didn’t want anyone to know that I couldn’t read,” Baker said.

Even so, she knew she was supposed to open her Bible and refer to it as the sermon progressed. “I was thinking, how could I know what chapters and verses to turn to, because I usually listen to them on a tape?

“But I could, like, make out letters. It was really hard but I could, like, sound them and kind of feel them. It’s hard to explain if you don’t understand dyslexia, but you can somehow push yourself through the words.”

While she anticipated struggling to find the verses and being embarrassed, incredibly, for that day, whichever verse Hagin pointed to, she would land on that exact page when she opened her Bible.

Glenda would look at her and say: “You’re on the page!”

He would quote another verse. “And there it was!” Heidi testified. “Boom! I am on the page again!” 

Grace upon grace 

Empowered by the grace of God, Baker would go on to pick up various languages and dialects in order to serve in the mission field in Asia, where she spent 12 years.

She became fluent in Bahasa Indonesia, and also learnt Cantonese in order to minister to the poor and elderly in Hong Kong.

The Potter’s hand: “You who are marginalised, challenged or sidelined: God can do anything through anyone,” Baker exhorted.

“At the height of the ministry in Hong Kong, we were reaching the po-pos (Cantonese for “grandmother”) and all the people that even the ministries which work with the poor didn’t want.

“Our church was full of people dressed in bags and old grannies in rags. We had food cooking, night and day,” Baker recalled. “It was my joy zone and I loved it so much.”

Nevertheless, when the Lord told her to leave to get her Master’s degree, she obeyed – as she had previously when He asked her to get her Bachelor’s, which she had thought impossible given her dismal Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) results.

With what she called “the worst SAT scores in California”, Baker found herself miraculously accepted into Vanguard University, an Assemblies of God institution. It was where she completed her undergraduate and, subsequently, her graduate studies.

She would also go on to earn a PhD in systematic theology from King’s College London.

“God healed my brain. The Lord anointed my brain,” she declared. “God can do anything with you, and do anything with your brain. He is the Potter and we are the clay.

“It’s a miracle. When God calls you, He calls you to the impossible and fills you with the Holy Spirit, again and again and again.

“You who are marginalised, challenged or sidelined, or you who have been told that you cannot do what God called you to do: God can do anything through anyone.

“It is only by the power of the Spirit and the joining together of the Body of Christ.” 

Empowered by a vision 

Today, Baker oversees a broad ministry under the umbrella of Iris Global, a missions non-governmental organisation she founded in 1980 with her husband, Rolland Baker.

From ministering together in Asia, they were called in 1995 to Mozambique, the poorest country in the world at the time. They poured out their lives among abandoned street children and witnessed a revival movement that spread throughout the bush across Mozambique’s 10 provinces.

Besides Bible schools, Iris Global has set up medical clinics, church-based orphan care, well-drilling and primary schools, and is about to start a fully-accredited university in Mozambique.

“We have found our Rector and we have signed the contract with him,” she shared. “And guess what? Twenty years ago, when God told me to go and buy land to open this university, He had just also saved this man of God, our Rector who is a Mozambicano.

“I needed a Mozambicano Rector. I didn’t want someone from Portugal or Brazil. Why? Because I knew that Mozambicanos needed a Mozambicano to lead them in this university that will change all of Africa.

“I never stopped believing in this vision.” 

Come to the altar: “He has a call on every single one of your lives,” Baker said. “But there is a cooperation that comes with the call.”

The dance of God

Baker, at 64, still dances. In fact, she has become a new type of dancer for the Lord.

“I ask Holy Spirit to fill me that I might dance the dance of God. Sometimes, I miss the steps and I stumble. Sometimes, I miss the rhythm. Sometimes, I don’t hear properly. But He doesn’t shame me.

“His love compels me on and He says, ‘Come on, put your feet on My feet, and your hands in My hands and I will fill you’,” she said.

In closing, she cited Romans 9:20-21, and challenged the audience to come to a yielded place so that the treasure that God has deposited in them can be released to impact others.

“We are not the ones that choose,” she exhorted. “He chose me when I was 16 years old.

“He has a call on every single one of your lives. But there is a cooperation that comes with the call.

“Whatever the call of God is on your life, there is a yielded place that He longs for you to get to, and He woos you and wills you in.”

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