A missions movement committed to a tangible expression of love.
Written By: Joy Ercoli, VP of Operations for Iris Global
Stop for the One is the child sponsorship program for Iris Global.
Iris is first and foremost about sharing the good news of Jesus and His love. We are not a faith-based humanitarian charity, rather we are missions movement committed to a tangible expression of love, and our call, in particular, is to serve the destitute, the lost, the broken, and the forgotten.
Heidi & Rolland didn’t set out to start an organization – they didn’t survey the landscape and choose a social problem to tackle. Instead, they embarked on a life-mission to reach the lost with the soul-saving truth of Jesus. It wasn’t until nearly 30 years of organic unplanned growth in ministry later that Rolland took time to look back and see what it was that made Iris Iris – what was is that sustained and propelled Iris to go from two unknown missionaries to a recognizable organization with 69 locations in 37 countries.
In his book, Keeping the Fire, Rolland explores what he found to be our core values. He said up until that time, the core values were mostly taken for granted – they seemed obvious from Scripture and they didn’t the need to draw attention to them in any special way. However, it became apparent that the truths in Scripture God highlighted as essential to Heidi and Rolland became the identity of what was growing into a worldwide missions ministry.
Here is an excerpt from Keeping the Fire about our first Core Value that sets the stage for everything else.
Rolland writes:
“We understand we can find God and can experience intimacy, communication, and companionship with Him in His presence. Missions has often been taught by others as unromantic – as disciplined obedience to the Great Commission. They teach that prayer is hard work, feelings are irrelevant, and getting the job done is what counts. They imply that we don’t need spiritual experience to proclaim the Gospel; that we can’t expect intimacy with God to be normal and that we can function without the manifest presence of God.
At Iris we feel the exact opposite. We’ve gone through enough fire and hardship to know that without actually finding God we cannot do what we do.
We cannot love with supernatural, unstoppable love unless we first experience the love of the Father ourselves. Our first value is to know Him in a passionate relationship with a love that is stronger than death. We major first of all not on mission strategy, methods, projects, and fundraising, but on encountering the love that a love-starved world craves and needs. This does not mean we are attracted to mindless, impersonal mysticism – to “experience” without content or relationship. No – Jesus is our heart’s desire. We relate to Him with both our minds and hearts; we engage with Him and find life and joy in our interaction. When we find Him we find and gain everything. Without Him we can do nothing of real value. Therefore we start by finding God and relying on Him!”
Adoration
For Iris, all fruitfulness flows from intimacy. Our priority is on prayer and worship and the interesting this is the more we pray, the more we want to go out on the streets. The more we dedicate ourselves to seeking the Father, the more we want to minister to the lost. It is a natural overflow to progress from loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength to loving our neighbor. The results of that overflow are the projects and programs Iris has to stop for the one in need.
Outreach
Not surprisingly, one of our major programs is Outreach. We have teams going out every day to hospitals, prisons, villages, landfills, brothels – you name it – to share the good news of Jesus. These teams are made up of missionaries who were trained in one of our Harvest Mission Schools, local pastors who oversee the thousands of churches planted by Iris, and even visitors who come from all over the world just to experience what they have read and heard about. The pursuit and goal of our outreaches is spiritual. Our teams, full of the love of God, look to bring love, joy, and peace to hurting hearts. However, as we reach out to the spiritually poor we are confronted by their physical poverty as well and it would be an incomplete Gospel if we didn’t stop and put our faith into action.
Education
Iris’ expansion into providing education is because we believe love looks like something. At its beginning, Heidi learned about the tragic reality facing many students in Mozambique. Rather than progressing from grade to grade based on merit, many teachers forced students to pay monetary bribes or bribes of even far higher price in order to pass the grade. Heidi’s response to this injustice was swift and what started out as a group of kids she had brought in off the streets having school under a mango tree has grown to 24 locations educating over 9,000 students last year.
Relief
We follow Jesus’ admonition to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and give water to the thirsty. Through our relief efforts we meet people at their most desperate, and have provided millions of meals to people who would otherwise go without. Our mercy ministry programs provide assistance to the most vulnerable people in our communities – widows who need a new roof to get through rainy season, disabled children and adults who find themselves on the fringe and need help with the essentials, mico-finance and business training for single mothers working toward a better life for themselves and their children, and drilling wells to give whole communities easy access to clean safe water. Our programs also help in times of natural disaster and we provide physical and emotional relief to suffering people. In flooding, earthquakes, hurricanes, fires and whatever else nature can think of, we bring in basic supplies, help with recovery and rebuilding, and always share the hope we have in Jesus.
DEVELOPMENT
We know transformation takes time and one of our Irisisms is “to go low and slow.” Our development projects start where our relief programs end. Iris is investing in the long-term by caring for over 11,000 children through our full-time Children’s Centers, family-centered child care, anti-trafficking day programs, and more. When Heidi and Rolland arrived in Mozambique just after the end of its Civil War, they were literally taking abandoned kids off the streets and into their home. Now our ministry centers around the world are working to implement UN-approved Best Practices for the care of at-risk and vulnerable children. We also have 12 thriving agriculture programs growing food served at our centers, providing jobs for national staff, and creating a sustainable source of income for our ministries.
Healing
Our approach to sickness and health allows us to use both supernatural and natural prescriptions. When an ill person is encountered on outreach or through one of our 12 Health Centers we always pray for them knowing God is our healer and His miracles point people to Him. Iris has seen thousands of people miraculously healed with deaf ears being opened, blind eyes seeing, malaria vanishing, and more.
But we are also grateful that God invented medicine and put those secrets in Creation from the beginning. Medical missionaries, locally trained staff, and even kids who grew up in our centers to become doctors and nurses themselves provided care and treatment to over 27,000 patients last year. In addition, we are opening our first Maternity Clinic – the Zoe Maternity Ward – in Pemba, Mozambique because we have experienced first-hand the critical need to provide free access to quality maternal & prenatal care to mothers and their babies.
Measuring success
Now to the question at hand: How does Iris measure its impact and what does success look like to Iris? I resisted the urge to trot out our exemplary financial stewardship, our thousands of generous supporters, successful audits, our ECFA accreditation, and Platinum status on Guidestar. There is a very real pressure (and sincere purpose) for nonprofit organizations to show big numbers to justify our existence and work. I know this because it is one of my major projects each year to gather all the programmatic information from our locations and create an annual report. The analyst in me wants to examine each program and calculate which ones are most effective, the most transformative. Has such-and-such a program increased life expectancy? Do wages earned over a lifetime go up? Are students staying in school longer, getting better grades, etc?
That analysis is useful and puts statistics to the testimony of God’s goodness. It’s like the Apostle John’s account of The Loaves & Fishes. It’s cool that Jesus fed all those hungry people, but because they counted and recorded the number of people, how much food they started with, and how much food was left over – now that’s what really makes it a testimony!
Iris is now at the stage of organizational growth where we have the capacity and luxury to invest in these kinds of measurements and we are working toward building systems and a culture that values a data-driven component to support the less-quantifiable but eternally more significant missional piece of our programs.
In short, Iris doesn’t measure success by what we do, but by how we do it. Even as we develop the metrics to provide the quantitative context to our ministry and are able demonstrate our impact to our supporters, our definition of success will nevertheless still come down to: “Did we do it with love?” For Iris, the transformational impact of stopping for the one is just as important as reaching the many.
Filled with love
We are confident in the part God has called us to play and we want to carry that call on faithfully to the end. It is with that confidence we humbly and earnestly cheer on others who are also part of God’s Grand Plan to show the world how much He loves it. Heidi has often explained this idea with an image of a fishing net. In her description, Iris is just one little piece of the net with other groups and individuals making up the rest. If we were all separate, no one would catch any fish, but it is through connection and support that many fish are caught. The strength that Iris brings to the net is this: When you are filled with Love and grasp His beautiful pursuit of the ones He loves, you will take every opportunity to stop for the one in front of you.
