An Interview of Sorts: An Update & A Week In The Life

The very kind Doc sent me a message recently that had some good questions about our time here in M*ngolia - so good in fact I thought they might make a good blog. Thanks Doc!

“What’s your official (satisfying governement agencies) reason for being there?”

My official reason for being here is that I’m a Peace Corps volunteer’s husband. My work visa was secured by the hospital, so the government knows me as an English teacher at the hospital.

What activities do you do in that regard?

I teach English to the doctors and nurses at the central hospital in our aimag, or state. I have one class of doctors and one class of nurses. This also involves judging or scoring the impromptu English competitions they like to have. M*ngolians love competitions. I also help by teaching them some basic computer and internet skills and simple translation.

What other things do you do?

On Tuesdays I co-teach a Bible study at the church with my Canadian friend, Jonny. Right now we’re going through Romans and teaching their small group leaders; so what we teach them on Tuesdays disseminates out from there and gets taught in all of the small groups on Thursdays. I’ve also preached in the youth church service twice and will be preaching in the main service in a couple weeks. In that vein, I also help teach our ex-pat Bible study occasionally.

After work on Wednesdays I teach English to the missionaries and staff at the YWAM base on the edge of the city. That’s one of my favorite things to do because it’s such a unique community and everyone is so great there. It’s a small building that’s basically one long hallway with rooms on each side. I’m guessing that it houses about twelve families and a dozen singles who are all going through an intensive YWAM school of Biblical studies. Everything is communal and there is one bathroom, an outhouse, outside. I teach in the kitchen/cafeteria while a team of women prepares dinner for everyone. It’s pretty amazing to see.

I never saw this coming but Kim and I have been able to serve our Mongolian friends by doing their wedding photography. God blessed us with so much help with our wedding, we’re happy to lend our services back out to our friends too. We’re also taking pictures for the Mongolian Missions Conference this weekend; which is the biggest gathering of Christians for the year (maybe 700 people).

Lastly, Kim and I co-teach an English conversation hour at the Christian cafe every Friday night and have the best students over once a month for a cooking and movie night where we teach them how to cook a Western dish with Mongolian ingredients and then we watch a movie together. Last time we watched The Princess Bride.

Two projects that I’ve had on the side but that I’d really like to complete before I leave are possibly getting the rights to license and print Bibles so that they’re more affordable for the Mongolians - that I’d do with my friend Jonathan - and the other is that I’d like to get one or two good Christian books translated for the church.

What kind of humanitarian impact do you feel you’re having?

I don’t think I’ll be able to see immediate humanitarian impact at the hospital because my students have such basic English. My prayer and goal is that I can equip them with English so that doors will open for them to get more training and more opportunities; whether they are utilizing more modern techniques at home or getting to work overseas. Maybe they’ll pass on the English to their children too so that those doors open for them earlier in life. At the very least they’ll be able to interact more confidently with western doctors that do short term visits in the hospital. I do the best I can knowing that I probably won’t see the results myself and hoping that the benefits of knowing English spread to their families, to the rest of the hospital, and to the community at large.

What spiritual impact do you feel you’re having?

When given the opportunity to teach or share my faith I beg God to keep me faithful to His Word, knowing that faith comes from hearing and that He is doing, and will do, far more than I will ever see or know. I do my best to do the necessary preparation and bring the truth of the passage to bear on my own heart first. Then, each time I teach I do everything I can to point to the cross. That way He gets the glory and not my silly self. It’s a clumsy process because I’m such an impatient sinner, but it’s one I ask for His help with because He IS patient and faithful. I’ve been fortunate to have some wise counseling while I’ve been out here and I’m so thankful for that.

So, in short, I say yes when I’m asked to teach and I beg and trust that God will take it from there.

What is the impact of all this on YOU?

I’ve really struggled trying to answer this one because I don’t think I could summarize it yet. I think the best thing I might be able to do is just tell you about this past week.

The church that we go to in Erdenet hosted a national missions conference the past few days. It’s one of the largest gatherings of Christians in the country and has about 700-800 attendees. This year they celebrated the 10 year anniversary of the Mongolian Missions Center in Erdenet (the organization I teach English for on Wednesday nights) and had the missionary who started the church out here come back to speak (he is now planting a church in Turkey).

Here are a few notes from what impacted me:

1) Being in a worship service in another country blows apart your narrow, homogeneous views of God. When you hear people in a completely foreign language worshiping passionate and praying desperately, you realize how small your view of God is. I like to sit there in worship, close my eyes, I imagine that that is what heaven is going to sound like - worship in tongues and languages we’ve never heard. We go to church a lot out here and it never ceases to floor me.

2) This small, young M*ngolian Church is intense about missions. Christianity has only existed in M*ngolia since the early 90s and the number of Christians here is in the thousands (less than 2% of the population are believers). Despite that, they have missionaries serving all over Mongolia, in Afgh*nistan, China, Korea, Russia, and the neighboring ‘stans.

3) During the conference, the missionary who has been working in Afgh*nistan with the woman who was shot there a few weeks ago spoke. She delivered a powerful, lucid declaration of the Gospel that might’ve made some people back home squirm. She said that if we go on mission and don’t preach the cross and why Jesus died, people don’t understand what they’re believing in or why it’s so important. She said that if we don’t preach the cross then people remain under curse of Adam (original sin) and can’t be brought from death to life. One of the members on her team also shared last week in church and said that the last conversation he had with the woman who was murdered by the Talib*n was about suffering. Her last words to him? “I’m ready”.

4) The missionary from N. Korea shared and relayed, with tears in her eyes, the stories about people in N. Korean countryside who are starving to death because of the government’s policies. She said that because Mongolia has more than enough, they should share with their N. Korean brothers and sisters.

5) I had never seen a missionary pastor/church planter in action before today. It deeply affected me. Here was a man from Sweden who brought his wife and kids to Mongolia for 10 years to plant a church, who started his family in a nation as difficult as this. His Mongolian was absolutely perfect; there wasn’t even a hint of a foreign accent. He preached in their native tongue, and he preached powerfully. He preached to them and related to them like a fellow M*ngolian. We talk a lot about contextualization and being missional back in the States, but I’ll tell you what, what I saw this man do completely blew the doors off of those words for me. It made what is often a petty debate in America, urgent and vital. Before today I could’ve given you a list of people and churches who get being missional right, but what I saw this afternoon rocked me.

6) In his sermon the pastor made the fantastic point that missions is a mandate in Christianity. He used 5 scriptures in the NT that commanded it. He said that there are basically two kinds of calls; the call to and the call to send. He said that so often Christians only think of the “going” and rarely of the sending. His point was that the senders should support and love those who go in such a way that is sacrificial to support the sacrifices those who go have to make. Then, at the end of the service they had a time where they said that anyone who felt called to go to missions should come forward to receive prayer, and those who felt called to send should stay in their seats and the two groups would pray for each other.
Let me show you what that looked like. Here is the picture I took of it:

Look at the proportions between the two groups. It was overwhelming to see the passion, conviction, and radical nature of these people and their faith.

So, that was my week. One of the about 75 I’ll have had here before I leave. That’s why, even when things are at their most difficult here, we are joyful and thankful.