Rev. Dr. Norbert Rakiro is pastor/doctor who believes in miracles and is helping to organize a Christian medical conference in Nairobi next May.

The Rev. Dr. Norbert Rakiro is a Kenyan doctor who leads several lives and is on a search for Higher Ground.

Dr. Rakiro pictured with his wife Laureen

To start with, Dr. Rakiro is a physician, epidemiologist and public health specialist, holding a Bachelors of Medicine and Bachelors of Surgery (MBChB) combined degree from the University of Nairobi, Masters of Public Health (MPH) and a post-graduate certificate in Emergency Preparedness and Response (EPR) from Braun-Hadassah and Rothberg International schools respectively, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.

He specializes in infectious diseases maternal and child health and is married to Laureen Magotsi, an advocate with the High Court, and is father to Shirley and Sharon.

If this wasn’t enough, Dr. Rakiro is the Founder and Executive Director of Higher Ground Ministries International (Kenya), General overseer of the Higher Ground Assemblies and Senior Pastor of the Higher Ground Assembly in the Kenyan capital city.

Higher Ground Ministries International is a global, Christian, non-denominational, bible-believing ministry whose vision was given to the Rev. Dr. Norbert Rakiro in 1997 while he was studying at the medical school of the University of Nairobi. It is registered in Kenya, and has a call to reach the whole world and is forging partnerships globally for the sake of advancing the Kingdom of God.

The doctor says that “God has commissioned this ministry to a five-fold assignment; preaching of the Word of God; teaching the whole counsel of God from scripture; raising up leaders; touching the world with practical expressions of God’s love, and influencing society through the presence of the Body of Christ.”

Over the past ten years HGMI has been involved in church planting, crusades, conferences, revival meetings, leadership training and media ministry in both reaching the world and building the church.

The doctor has ministry experience spanning 17 years in “helps” ministries, evangelism, worship/music, teaching, travelling/itinerant ministry and pastoral work across several denominations, which include the Medical School Christian Union, Campus Crusade for Christ (Life Ministry) and other Para-church organisations and is currently pursuing a PhD in Divinity.

I met up with Dr. Rakiro recently in Seoul, Korea, at the 29th anniversary of the Manmin Central Church, which has 100,000 members and 9,000 branch churches.

Dan Wooding interviews Dr. Rakiro in Seoul

During oue interview, he told me what he is doing at the moment in the medical field. “I work with the government and private and faith-based hospitals to support them in their systems their training and generally help to take care of doctors,” he said.

I then asked if him why, as a medical doctor, he believed in miracles?

“Because, if you believe in God, you believe in the supernatural and also I believe in miracles because they are in scripture, and also because I have experienced them in my clinical practice,” he said firmly.

I asked him then to recount some of them.

“The first was very early on when I was doing my internship in the year 2000,” he said. “There was a 65-year-old gentleman who had been in bed for a couple of months and they weren’t really sure why he wasn’t able to walk.

“I was just going out to an outreach within the hospital during my lunch break and I asked him if he wouldn’t mind me praying with him and he agreed. I laid hands on him and I called on God to bring ‘health’ to his sick body and as I then went two beds ahead, I heard someone shouting, and so I went back and here was the man walking up to me and waving

“Apparently, he had a paralysis in one of the legs, so he was completely unable to walk. They weren’t sure if it was a Guillain-Barre Syndrome or something like that.

“There were also other cases such as a lady with an incomplete abortion and she had become septic and was bleeding so badly that we couldn’t control it. I prayed with her and the fever immediately left her and the bleeding stopped. We discharged her the next morning. In this particular case, as I started praying with her, an evil spirit came out of her and, as soon as the evil spirit came out, the bleeding had stopped and the fever had gone. So I’m way past the point of needing to be convinced about it because I’m sold out from cases like that.”

The Kenyan medical delegation with other attendees for the celebrations in Seoul. Dr. Rakiro is second right

Dr. Rakiro is the coordinator of the committee for the 9th Annual World Christian Doctors Kenya Christian Medical Conference to be held next May in Nairobi under the theme of “Spirituality and Medicine.”

As at all of the previous WCDN conferences, doctors and medical professionals will present case studies on what they claimed are “miracles” and show on a big screen the medical data to prove how desperately ill the patient had been and then will tell the story of that patient who had been healed in a way that could not be explained other than God had done the curing.

“We want to bring to the conference no less than two-hundred African doctors,” he said. “We are trying to see if we can source a doctor or two from every African country and there are fifty-four of them. We are already working with medical and dental associations in Africa and we are also mobilizing the Kenya Christian Medical Association.”

What did he hope to achieve through the conference?

“I want the issue of God’s ability to heal to be firmly on the national discussion table so that people know once and for all that God is able to heal, so that pastors know they don’t have to fake miracles and don’t have to beg for this to happen, as I believe that this is their right as ‘kingdom citizens’ to experience the miraculous.” said Dr. Rakiro.

“We also want to trigger this discussion among the medical fraternity so that people will know that doctors are not the ‘be all’ or ‘end all’, but there is another level to healing.

“We would also wish to encourage Christian doctors in their local country and in the continent of Africa to pray more with their patients because people come to doctors at their weakest point and they are willing to receive help both from physical and the supernatural without the doctor being abusive and without necessarily forcing, or lording, their beliefs on them, but give them an opportunity to know that there is something else that can also help them.”

The main website for WCDN is: http://www.wcdn.org/

Note: I would like to thank Robin Frost for transcribing this interview.

Dan Wooding, 70, is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he has been married for 48 years. They have two sons, Andrew and Peter, and six grandchildren who all live in the UK. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS) and was, for ten years, a commentator, on the UPI Radio Network in Washington, DC. He now hosts the weekly “Front Page Radio” show on KWVE in Southern California which is also carried throughout the United States. The program is also aired in Great Britain on Calvary Chapel Radio UK and also in Belize and South Africa. Besides this, Wooding is a host for His Channel Live, which is carried via the Internet to some 200 countries and also provides a regular commentary for Worship Life Radio on KWVE. You can follow Dan Wooding on Facebook under his name there or at ASSIST News Service. He is the author of some 44 books. Two of the latest include his autobiography, “From Tabloid to Truth”, which is published by Theatron Books. To order a copy, press this link. Wooding, who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents, has also recently released his first novel “Red Dagger” which is available this link.