Under His Wings (Autobiography)
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Under His Wings (Autobiography) By H. A. Baker Missionary to Tibet, China, and Formosa Author of Plains of Glory and Gloom, Visions Beyond the Veil Heaven and the Angels, The Three Worlds, Through Tribulation to Glory And several other books Iris 2008 Edition Page 1 Foreword to the Iris 2008 Edition When Rolland and Heidi Baker first went abroad as missionaries in 1980, forming what is now called Iris Ministries, they did not do so absent the guiding impulse of a long vocational ancestry. To be understood rightly that descent must be traced down lines both spiritual and natural, but of all its recent progenitors, perhaps the single most influential on either count was Harold Armstrong Baker. He was Rolland Baker’s grandfather, and my great-grandfather. His were the core mission practices — expressions of his highest values for all ministry — which have influenced those of my parents to a greater extent than have any other examples in living memory. Rolland Baker, my father, grew up in the Far East, as had all the Bakers from Harold onwards. Newly wed, he would return there with my mother soon after they had completed college in America. It was their first mission field. They began in Indonesia, home of my own earliest memories, and soon came to Hong Kong, where for four years they labored among widows, gangs, and the homeless in some of earth’s most crowded slums. In their constant devotion to the poorest and most “problematic” individuals, as well as in their willingly subservient adoption of a dizzying myriad of cultural novelties for the gospel’s sake, they closely mirrored much of Harold Baker’s work — consciously to some degree, but even more so as a natural and effortless result of a shared vision of Christ’s special love for the downcast. When my parents came to Africa some fifteen years later, they were borne there not by whim, but by a very particular momentum which has now crested with a remarkable revival in Mozambique and many nations beyond. This has proven a divine work that unquestionably reverberates in the same spiritual notes as one which God ignited the better part of a century ago, in one of the most remote and then-wild regions of China. In that movement, Harold Armstrong Baker was used as a primary catalyst, serving for many years as a nearly lone spiritual custodian to numerous tribespeople in the far southwest Page 2 mountains of Yunnan province. I believe that God has seen fit to preserve the inheritance of his calling and lifelong service, among many other ways, by its distinct bestowal upon his grandchildren. That older movement in China can be traced further back, of course, to Azusa Street and from thence back through all the centuries filled with saints. Yet with Harold Baker, if nothing else, the course of our own family surely takes a radical turn for the most pioneering forms of ministry (as our friend Dr. Chevreau once pointed out, my parents have usually not so much resembled “settlers” as they have “commandoes.”) Beyond this, however, I believe that through the work of Harold’s lifetime something new and distinctive can be seen to emerge, which before was not but today remains — in Iris as well as in many other ministries worldwide. Of what this distinctiveness consists is best grasped, like so many of God’s most profound blessings, through its story — and there are few resources today that can stand alongside this one for telling it. This is Harold Baker’s autobiography. Notably, one of those few other resources is Harold's most well known book, Visions Beyond the Veil. That work details the extraordinary blessings and extensive visions of the supernatural world given to a small group of orphaned children at the Adullam orphanage, whom he and his wife had taken in from the brutal streets of a small mining town by the name of Kotchiu. For those who have read Visions Beyond the Veil, this autobiography will locate the events recounted there, among a great many others that he considered to be of equally surpassing wonder. (Indeed, what multitude of signs and miracles he witnessed in his earthly life we are now unlikely to discover, this side of heaven, but these further accounts ought to serve as a fine supplement for the hungry.) In light of the events of Visions Beyond the Veil, it is just one conspicuous example of the continuity between the blessings Harold recounted and those we have seen in Mozambique today that a majority of the most powerful supernatural experiences among us have occurred with Page 3 our children. Much like Harold’s rescued orphans, we have a large family of kids who came to us from one of the most unreported, politically insignificant and apparently powerless social strata in the world — street urchins and village outcasts in one of the world’s poorest nations. Giving them a home and a family has been the central effort of Iris Ministries since 1995, and it is by no means coincidental or arbitrary that they are blessed after the heritage of the children of Adullam. For whatever common mantle God may have passed from Harold to Rolland and Heidi Baker, through years and faithful generations, surely it can never be separated from this: a burning desire not only to save souls, but to bring the fullness of the miraculous power of the manifest Holy Spirit specifically to those whom the world has considered the most hopeless, the most afflicted, the most negligible, and the most lacking in all modernistic potential. It is the privilege of this call to render to these the service due kings. Harold Baker was above all else honored to serve as heaven’s ambassador to peoples that remained, by and large, very far from the world’s centers of focus. He lived a life almost entirely isolated from all attentions of the socially lofty. Yet in all sincerity, he considered the men and women of his chosen tribes priceless, seeing in them eternal fruits exceeding the worth of every treasure of his age. He cared far less whether they or he should become famed in the nations than he did for the service itself; nonetheless, God had a purpose in the recording of these things, and Harold’s writing too was prompted by more than whim. Harold knew and taught that God especially loves to bless such peoples, not in spite of the low appraisal the world gives them, but precisely because of it. He believed that God’s attitude concerning the poor ought always remain a lesson to us, a theme to be read and re-read throughout his rough-hewn books. One finds in them a voice proclaiming that the poor are blessed because God’s power is made perfect in weakness; blessed because his grace is sufficient. They are blessed because He would Page 4 use the things that are not to shame the things that are; blessed because He confounds the wisdom of wise. Blessed because of the compassion of the heart that spoke out in the beatitudes; blessed because He would have witnesses that His power does not end, but rather begins with being victorious over the darkest and most challenging of all human circumstances. Most of all, they are blessed simply because these whom He loves are those who have not refused to enter into His wedding feast — even while so many of their richer judges have deferred. What Iris does today is built on the premise that what God does through them will yet shake the world to its foundations. Insofar as the culture of ministry my parents have sought to build holds these things to be true, and inasmuch as they have been entrusted with the testimony, the revelations, and the responsibility that have accompanied God’s call to their particular field of service, they, along with all of us who would stand alongside them, remain indebted to Harold Baker. Not chiefly for his direct teachings, though many are fine ones; nor for the texts he left, valuable as many of them are. But we are indebted above all for the heart which God put in him concerning these things, which stands behind us like a mountain extending its kind shadow across our path — the memory of a forbear who finished his race with all his heart. With toil and devotion he uncovered anew for his descendents a great many of those old wells of truth from which we, in our present labors, are constantly refreshed. We believe that the privilege of tending the still-living fruits of his service is to us an exceptional honor, and to him a standing reward. Now neither this honor nor any other of his greatest legacies — whether of learning or wisdom, understanding or compassion, or of any other kind — are in any way confined to us. Ultimately, the things Harold Baker gave a life towards are not merely principles for missionaries; they are far more. They are concrete visions of how God has Page 5 loved and cared for some of His children in the world — how He has been pleased to work in men and to make Himself plain to them. They are a still-unfolding collection of His stories, each one unique, each an irreplaceable portrait of the Unchanging One. As particular expressions of God’s heart, they will always remain liable to shoot forth roots and bloom again… in all cultures, times, and places. Should this newly redistributed edition of Harold Baker’s life story find any reader with a hunger for those treasures, whole-heartedly we pray that any and all of them may fall also to you — in form and measure apposite to that life which has been prepared for you.