Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the desert
and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:19
This is the second part of the story about the growth of the Mongolian Church. One neat thing is that I have a friend named Christine who was a missionary in Mongolia. I asked her to share her thoughts about the growing church in Mongolia. This is what she said:
"What I'm sensing, as I am here, I feel the Lord is doing a purifying work. Because He is a holy God, and requires us to be holy, I feel that the Lord is coming in His holiness into the church. He is purifying the church and wanting to take them "deep."
As 1st generation believers, they've gone through a lot. As the Lord purifies the church, I see Him wanting to heal, restore, renew, and revive the church...esp. the leaders of the church. The Lord is exposing darkness, so that the church can truly be light. In so doing, He wants to take the church deeper.
Personally, I see myself as a "wounded healer." and I wonder if the Lord is using Mongolian believers to be that...
Mongolian believers DO have such a heart for evangelism. And I agree that I can see Mongolians being such strategic people to be sent to the world. You can't help but to pray that the Lord use these people to conquer nations for the Lord. In the past they may have conquered nations by killing and attacking them, but this time, that they would conquer nations with life in Christ...with the love of Christ.
I can see their potential. We need more people who have hearts to disciple and mentor these leaders...to walk through character formation, take them deeper into His presence, His will."
Here is the second half of Brian Hogan's story about the Church in Mongolia. I pray it will encourage and excite you to see what God is doing in our world! If you have not read the first part, I encourage you to read it at Mongolia, from darkness to light in our generation
Many centuries before, when Tibetan Buddhist missionaries arrived in Mongolia, they adopted “Borkhan,” the generic Mongolian term for “god,” for their purposes. In the early ‘90s, nearly all the believers in Mongolia used another term for God, Yertontsin Ezen, which was a brand new term composed by a translator in an attempt to avoid any potential confusion or syncretism with the beliefs of Buddhism.
But the new term, which can be translated “Master of the Universe,” sounded unfamiliar and unreal to Mongolian ears. It had no intrinsic meaning for them and was essentially a foreign word made up of Mongolian elements. Although the Erdenet elders-in-training were used to using the term Yertontsin Ezen, they decided that the traditional term Borkhan would be more appropriate and acceptable and was capable of being filled with biblical meaning.
This change came just in time for the suddenly open crowds who witnessed healings and deliverances. The God who was working these wonders had a name that didn’t sound like science fiction."
I wrote about this very thing in my blog entries Is Allah God? and Eternity in their hearts
"During this period of explosive growth our team was careful to stay “behind the scenes,” giving on-the-job training for the emerging leaders. Care was taken to do everything in ways that could easily be imitated—baptisms were in bathtubs, worship songs were not imported, etc.
We made sure Jesus’ basic commands were taught in such a way that disciples could immediately respond in obedience. The house churches enabled, supported and encouraged these practical responses to the teaching from God’s Word. Believers helped one another to do the Word and not just hear it, often finding corporate ways to obey together.
Yet there were serious problems from our point of view where the cultural norms of Mongolian society conflicted with some of the moral teaching of the Scriptures. The elders-in-training were encouraged to search the Scriptures to find solutions for sin problems in the emerging church. Cultural blind spots in the areas of sexual purity and courtship were dealt with by defining principles, then teaching and enforcing them. The solutions these Mongol leaders crafted were both biblically and culturally correct—much better than solutions we missionaries might have crafted.
The emerging Mongolian church looked far different from any of our team’s home churches in Sweden, Russia or America. Dramas and testimonies quickly became prominent features of the large celebration meetings (which went from once to twice a month and eventually weekly). The “drama team” wrote and produced their own skits, plays and dramatic dances from Bible stories and everyday Mongolian life. This became a powerful teaching and evangelistic tool.
Time was always set aside for testimonies from “real Mongols” —often new believers in their ‘60s just come from the steppes. These long and, to Western ears, rambling stories of salvation gripped the fellowship in a state of rapt wonder and awe. God was on the move among their people— dressed in the most traditional of Mongolian clothing. Worship rose from their hearts as they sang new songs written by their own people in their own language and unique musical style. This was no foreign fad or import!
Our team of expatriates concentrated our efforts upon discipling, equipping and releasing Mongols to take the lead in building up the church and reaching the lost. A school of discipleship was formed and by the third class was entirely Mongol led. With the emphasis upon “learning by doing,” new leaders were trained locally in the ministry rather than being sent away. The leadership of the home gatherings had been placed into their hands almost immediately, and soon the Mongol believers also carried the majority of the responsibility for the weekly services.
All of this progress and growth was not overlooked by the Enemy. Beginning in November of 1994, our team and the fledgling church endured two solid months of unrelenting spiritual attacks: three cult groups targeted our city, the church was almost split, leaders fell into sin and some were demonized. Our team came close to despairing and pulling out.
Finally, two sudden and unexplainable deaths rocked the missionary team and the church. My only son, Jedidiah, had been born on November 2nd. On the morning of Christmas Eve our apartment rang with screams when Louise discovered Jedidiah’s cold and lifeless body—dead of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome at two months. We buried our boy and a piece of our hearts in the frozen soil on a cold windswept hillside outside of town. The next day a young girl in the church died from an unknown cause.
In response, the believers and our team came together for 24 hours of prayer and fasting. At three in the morning, a breakthrough occurred and everyone knew it. The church has never been overwhelmed by an onslaught of spiritual warfare like that since.
As encouraging as this start in Erdenet was, it still fell short of the vision God had given to our team. We knew the planting of a single church in one city would not be the break-through to reaching an entire nation and beyond. We were aiming for a movement of indigenous and spontaneously multiplying churches within the Mongolian peoples, and the Mongolian believers themselves needed to share this goal.
At the very first baptism, Magnus shared this vision with the newly born body of Christ: to reach all the families of Erdenet with the gospel, to plant a daughter church in the neighboring province and to reach other unreached peoples of the world. The young believers, blissfully clueless, responded very enthusiastically. We trained all of the disciples to view the church as a living organism rather than an organization—a healthy “mother church” that would reproduce into daughter and granddaughter churches. The leaders we trained kept the vision—“God wants to plant new churches though our church”—before the members.
During the church’s second year, the elders sent out teams and planted a daughter church in a town 60 kilometers away. Because they were of the same people group, planting another congregation was easy for the Mongolians. The leaders the Lord raised up for this daughter church soon began sending teams out to plant granddaughter churches in other towns even farther from Erdenet.
After just three years of work by our team in Erdenet, we came to the realization that our efforts had borne good fruit and we had “worked ourselves out of a job.” In the beginning of 1996, we had successfully modeled and passed on every ministry and function in the church movement to Mongolian disciples. The Mongols were doing everything and we were just watching. The bittersweet moment that had been our goal all along had come. It was time to say goodbye.
The Easter service was packed—standing room only. Nearly 800 filled the largest hall in Erdenet with many more turned away by the authorities, who closed the doors when they saw the crowds. Those who managed to get in gathered to worship Jesus and to witness the ceremony marking the passing of authority from our foreign church planting team to the local elders. We explained and acted out the analogy of a relay race to portray graphically what was taking place. A baton was handed from our family and Magnus, representing the church planters, to a group of Mongolian leaders in full national dress. They were so ready!
The baton was passed. For the first time in history, a fully indigenous Mongolian church was in Mongolian hands—and they in turn were firmly in the nail-scarred hands of Jesus.
Our family left Mongolia that very day, and the rest of the team left in June when their English teaching commitments ended. In our absence, the Mongolian churches continued to grow and multiply. They started a number of mercy ministries as well. They began to feed and clothe street children, care for single mothers and prevent abortions and even planted a church among dump dwellers. All of these initiatives were completely from and by the Mongolian believers.
The movement continues. By 2008, the church in Erdenet had given birth to 15 daughter churches in towns scattered across the country. Some of their daughter churches have themselves reproduced from one to six granddaughter churches. A very satisfying report—considering we started with only teenage girls!
This movement has also been hard at work cross-culturally. Teams of Mongol church planters have been sent to Muslim peoples in two other countries, to an animistic forest tribal people, as well as already having launched church planting movements among several other Mongolian tribes. Five of the daughter churches and four granddaughter churches are missionary church plants among distinct ethnic groups. A missionary training school in Erdenet trains the Mongolian Church’s emerging mission force.
God seems to have made the spiritual soil of Mongolia especially fertile for church planting. The gospel continues to do its life giving and community-changing work. Churches continue to grow and reproduce.
Conservative estimates state that the number of believers grew from just two in 1990 to over 50,000 believers in 2005. Mongolia has changed from a mission field to being a powerful mission force— sending out more missionaries per believer than any other nation on Earth. As in a pre- vious age, Mongols again thunder off to the nations beyond their barren hills—this time under the leadership of the “Khan of Khans”—King Jesus!
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