Mongolian Happenings

This spring Jeff has been mentoring two men from our church. During one of those meetings they went through the process of how to share about Jesus using the Roman's road passages. He challenged them to share this with their unbelieving friends. A few weeks later Aagii and his wife went out on a young people's outreach to a different town and shared the Roman's road with an unbeliever and the person accepted Christ as his savior. We are so excited for them as they share their faith and see how God is working in their lives and the lives of people around them. Another Story... Just this past week our friend Boldoo's mom passed away. She was a believer but some of her family and friends were Buddhist. Jeff had performed the funeral for the family since none of the other pastors were around. Just yesterday Boldoo came to our house to share about what had been happening in his life. He had been taking a lot of ridicule from his neighbors and his aunt for not a lighting Buddhist candle in their ger to signify his mother's death and her mourning. He came to us looking for a way to substitute the Buddhist tradition with something from the Bible to help explain to people his faith in Christ. As they were talking Jeff thought of the verse in the Psalms, Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Jeff said to Boldoo, the Bible is our candle, it is our light and instead of placing the candle on the table place the Word of God on the table with this verse circled and share with people about how this is our candle, the Word of God.

Baby Ava

If you have not heard we are expecting our second child come Dec. 1st. We are very excited about this new addition to our family. We just found out we are going to be having another girl, so now are Kaylee will have a younger sister. She still doesn't always understand what that means but we know she will be a great big sister.

HAB Camp 2010

We had a great time at HAB camp this year. We went 100km up into the mountains, it took us 3 hours to get there crossing 6 rivers and only 1 truck got stuck. (Not mine praise the Lord) We had a good time talking about discipleship and reminding ourselves about the basic things we need to focus on as the Church of Bayankhongor.

As you can see above we also played volleyball, table tennis, and chess. Had a good time going to a close hot spring (that smelled like rotten eggs) and hiking up the near by hills.

Bread of Life

We were able to start a bread project this spring after the lunar new year.  In the province north of Bayankhongor there is a bread factory run by other Christians who bake the bread over a wood fire.  Bayankhongor Development Partnership Team (through our project funds) were able to bring them down to Bayankhongor and have them build a stove and show us how to use it.

                                                                          

After a few months of getting the permissions.  (Apparently the Mongolian government has to make sure we are not poisoning anyone, go figure).  We started baking bread and selling it to local shops.  We have learned that the most important thing is having the right people working.  We now have 3 full time young people working throughout the week baking bread.  They have also started attending church on Sundays where we have just started a very active young peoples program.

 

Right now we have realized that in order to make a profit and have our workers earning a decent income we need to build a bigger stove.  This first smaller stove cost around 1,000 USD.  The church sold an old Russian van and will take that money to build the bigger stove.  We can not sell the bread fast enough, our major bottleneck is that it takes 3 hours for the yeast to rise.  Not a bad problem to have at all.

 

We praise God that he was able to provide the funds and workers to make this project a success, at least so far.  We are hoping that we can take this concept and reproduce it in the countryside where bread is not always available and more expensive.

Herder Assistance

This spring we were also able to help 100 Bayankhongor herders.  Last summer was very dry and this winter has been very cold.  In Mongolia years like this are called a dzud, harsh winter.  Many animals have died and the spring was exceptionally cold preventing the new grass from growing.  Many different organizations are helping with food and feed for the herder families.  Mongolia's pasture is over grazed so JCS and many others thought it would be best to help only with food so that the herder families could make it through this hard time and rebuild their herds.

 

JCS chose to do their assistance to herders in Bayankhongor through Bayankhongor Development Partnership Team.  We chose 2 countryside locations in the Gobi desert and helped 50 herder families at each location.  We were able to help with Flour, rice, salt, sugar, tea and oil.  We also gave them a book about Psalm 23, the Lord is my Shepherd. 

In one of the locations there is a group of believers that meet occasionally and at the other there are no believers that we are aware of.  At the second location another JCS team is about to work all summer in digging a well so we look forward to what God will do in the lives of those people.  Both locations saw this assistance as coming from a Christian organization even though we are not registered as such.  Our name in Mongolian is very long and the local government could not remember it so they called us "The Christian Development Organization from Bayankhongor City".