God put Mongolia on my heart the spring of ’08. I began doing research and discovered that Mongolia had been experiencing a revival since 1990. According to Operation World, a missions research manual, there were only four known Christians in Mongolia in 1989. Today there are over 50,000, with that number growing daily. This rapid growth is due to the demise of the old Soviet Union and South Korean missionaries who have been working in Mongolia for the past 25 years. Of course, the main reason is because God’s Spirit has been blowing across this vast nation. I wanted to go to get in on that revival. Mongolia is twice the size of Texas with a population of 2 million. Over have of the population lives in the capital city of Ulaanbataar, known as UB. The others live out on the steppes in small canvass igloos called gers. These “country Mongolians” are the original horsemen of the world. Horses are their livelihood. This was another reason I wanted to go to Mongolia.
I was supposed to go to Mongolia with David Beckett in July, 2010. I had to cancel that trip due to my bout with malaria that summer. David was then the Chaplin at Hongdong University in South Korea. He had met a group of Mongolian students at the university, led them to Christ, and was discipling them in 2010. They had taken him to Mongolia on a few mission trips. David told me in 2010 that there were many pastors in Mongolia who were new believers and were asking for pastors to come help them with some pastoral training. But the pastors were also very particular because many cults had also been coming into Mongolia. David had met one of the leading pastors in eastern Mongolia which was key in bringing other pastors in to teach.
David Beckett led our trip to Mongolia along with myself, Terry Taylor, a deacon in Kingsland’s First Baptist Church, and Greg Lewis, the founder and president of Go and Tell Ministries. The dates for our trip were August 6-22. We had been planning and preparing for months.
The Sunday before we left, I asked the children of our church, during the children’s sermon, to be our prayer partners for the trip. I asked them to pray two verses from Psalm 34 each day we were gone and that we would be praying that Psalm for them as well. We adopted the song Ten Thousand Reasons, by Matt Redman, as our song for the trip. It came out of Psalm 34. The children also gave us the five-fold blessing for a mission trip; “Drink lots of bottled water, don’t eat too much, pray like crazy, give’em Jesus, and come back changed!”
We left San Antonio at 6:30 AM the next day, August 6th. We flew to Newark and then “over the top” to Beijing, China. I had never flown over the North Pole before. It was an 18 hour flight, and never got dark. We landed in Beijing in the middle of the afternoon on August 7th. This was a special time for me because 30 years earlier, August 7, 1982, God called me into the ministry. Now, 30 years later, I was in Beijing, China on my way to teach pastors in remote areas of Mongolia!
We spent the night in Beijing in a guest house called the 365 Inn. It is located near the Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing. This hostel was filled with young people from all over the world. We briefly spoke with some from the UK that evening. The next morning we were up early to the train station to board a Chinese train on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest railway in the world, for our two-day train ride to Ulaanbataar, Mongolia.
Shortly after the train got underway we discovered there were people from all over the world on the train with us. During the two days of travel were able to engage people from eight different nations in spiritual conversations about Christ. A father and his adult daughter from Germany were led to Christ by our team during the trip. This turned out to be a mission trip of its own.
Our little booth on the train was made up of two bench seats that doubled as beds, with two bunk beds overhead that folded up during the day. There was a small table by the window. Our bags fit under the bench seats. Outside our booth was a narrow hall way that went the full length of the car.
There were about twenty cars on our train. The last one was the dining car. Going from car to car was an experience with both cars moving side to side. You would step between them to cross over to the next car being careful not to get your foot caught in the “cross-over plates” from both cars. You could see the tracks as you crossed. It was quite the thrill ride just getting to the dining car. Each car had its own bathroom, similar in size to an airline restroom. The only difference is that when you “flushed” you saw the train tracks! Each car also was equipped with a boiler with hot water for tea or coffee 24 hours a day.
We shared some wonderful times of worship and Bible study which actually drew people to our booth to ask us questions about what we were singing. Worship-based prayer from the Scriptures draws people to Christ.
The border crossing from China to Mongolia was a four-hour experience I will never forget! I will write about it in the next blog.
