Heidi Baker / Iris Global: Healing Claims in Mozambique

Heidi Baker and her husband Rolland founded Iris Global (formerly Iris Ministries) in Mozambique in the 1990s. Their ministry focuses primarily on orphan care and church planting in some of Mozambique's most impoverished areas. Baker has claimed, across years of ministry and repeated accounts, that the blind receive sight and the deaf receive hearing in her ministry contexts.

The most rigorous investigation of these claims is the STEPP study, published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2010 by Candy Gunther Brown's team. That study found statistically significant improvements in measured hearing and vision in 24 consecutive participants prayed for by Baker and her team — but the study had no control group, was conducted in noisy field conditions known to produce practice-effect improvements, and did not include participants selected by baseline clinical criteria. The STEPP entry should be read alongside this one.

Beyond the STEPP study, Baker's individual healing accounts follow the standard testimony model: first-person narratives of specific healings, reported by the healed person or by Baker's ministry, without accompanying medical records documenting the pre-existing condition or post-prayer clinical assessment. This pattern is universal in charismatic healing ministry and does not establish that healings did not occur — it establishes that they cannot be independently evaluated.

Baker's ministry context — remote rural Mozambique with limited healthcare infrastructure — creates a genuine logistical challenge for documentation that should be acknowledged. Independent medical assessment of a claimed healing in a rural Mozambican village is not straightforward. That cuts both ways: the difficulty of documentation is real, but it also means the difficulty of distinguishing actual from claimed improvement is higher.