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Mongolian Church at Crossroads Since people began coming to Christ in Mongolia in the early 1990s the mission world has watched with wonder and believers around the world have prayed together with the Lord as He began to build His church in this far off land. The news of evangelism taking place in Mongolia started to attract the attention of various denominations and large para church agencies so that an influx of missionaries began to take place and the church started to grow. Visitors to Mongolia are impressed with the amount of love and zeal that is evident in the Mongolian believers. Indeed the birth of the church in Mongolia has been a major breakthrough among the unreached peoples of the world. But there is something missing, something that a visitor will not notice and which is the very reason for the need of long term resident missionaries on mission fields around the world and not just short term teams going in and out who will never be aware of such a thing until it is too late, a thing which now threatens the very life of the church in Mongolia today. The Mongolian church has been taught to love, on the basis that, "God is love," and "love never fails." And so the testimony that love fills the church in Mongolia today is true and the Mongols are experiencing the wonderful forgiveness that the love of God brings. But there is another side of love which has not yet been received in Mongolia. Though this other side of love has been mentioned and even stressed during times of crisis, it has not yet taken root in the minds and hearts of the Mongolian believers and will soon be their undoing if the situation is not soon corrected. The other side of love that I am talking about is hate. Along with love in the Mongolian church, sin is also rampant. The Mongols have not yet come to hate sin, or anything close to understanding this need. And so church after church sees one leader after another fall into sin, usually sexual immorality. Of course there has been teaching about sexual immorality and the command from God to abstain, and yet the fruit of all this teaching is not in evidence. The Mongol norm is that a girl gets pregnant, and then she and the boy may or may not get married and the girl and her family being left to care for the child alone is quite common. Except for a few rare exceptions which have seen only the strongest of the Mongolian church leaders wait until they are married to make a baby, the church remains unchanged from the culture. It is this lack of distinctiveness which threatens the future and further growth of the church in Mongolia. When young people began to come to the Lord in 1991 their parents were amazed at the change that took place in the lives of their children. They no longer lied or stole, and they stopped getting drunk with their friends, and many of them were sexually inactive. But that seems now because many of them were so young and they were willing to listen to the missionaries teaching from the word of God. And though the missionaries taught against sin it seems that we have failed to instill a hatred for sin in the Mongol believers whether young or old. Instead there is a very ho hum attitude towards sin in the Mongolian church today and church discipline is greatly lacking. Jesus said to "teach them to obey all things whatsoever I have commanded you." This is a far cry from simply teaching them "all things." Everyone likes to hear and be taught all things, but to obey? That is quite another matter. Nevertheless as time goes by in the life of a believer, the joy of forgiveness and salvation must mature into joy and sanctification of a holy life. This requires a strong hatred of sin to be accomplished. Having been in Mongolia during this entire time of the birth and development of the church up to the present, I can honestly say that blame cannot be laid at anyone's feet. We missionaries have done the best we could at hauling in a net which has seen the Mongolian church explode from zero to 10,000 in six years time. As mentioned, teaching against sin has been taught, but not in the way I am now expressing in a hatred for sin. May I call upon people around the world to join the missionaries in Mongolia to pray for the body of Christ in Mongolia to come to hate sin with a strong, healthy, God honoring hatred! God hates sin and so must we. The believers in Mongolia have yet to understand this and acquire such an attitude. Please pray for the Mongolian church leaders, the missionaries, and for the body of Christ in Mongolia itself, to begin to develop this other side of love. Our very life is at stake. Rick Leatherwood If you want some bio info: Rick Leatherwood is the field director of Mongolian Enterprises International and baptized the first believers in Mongolia during the present era when the country opened in 1990.

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Friday Fax 1997 Issue 48, 12 December China: Christians could have more influence as they dare to dream The following explosive statements were taken from an interview with a high-ranking official responsible for observing religious activity in China. He is a confessing Christian consciously working in atheistic surroundings. The interview was only granted under the condition of strict anonymity. The author is a respected authority on the development of Christianity and the current attitude of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party to Christian churches. The interview was led by Compass Direct, a part of "Open Doors", which published the statements mainly because many of the 'third wave' house-church leaders agree with the estimates and the insight that it provides into the attitude of high-ranking government officials to Christianity. (The 'third wave' is the name given to the house-churches started since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.) We quote only the Chinese official's own words: Discrimination, not true persecution "I distinguish between persecution and discrimination in China. There is very little true persecution, but massive discrimination. Discrimination happens almost when confessing Christians live in a country in which members of the Communist and hence officially atheist party are in almost complete control. That is discrimination. The Chinese government made a stupid mistake in equating Christianity with public services. They believe that if people can meet in the church, then they must be free. They fail to understand that Christianity is a lifestyle. That is the source of the discrimination. In the past, millions were persecuted in China; the current situation is an enormous improvement. In comparison with China's enormous population, there is very little true persecution in the sense of imprisonment and beatings of Christians. In addition, most are soon released. In 9 out of 10 cases involving Christians, the imprisonment was a result of real offences such as extremely naive political statements. The West may have long refused to believe this, but China also has its share of dangerous sects. Mao's ideology is outdated. China is adopting capitalism and opening itself to the West. Mao's ideology, the power behind past persecution, is outdated. Members of the Chinese government are very uncertain, not only in regard to Christianity, and uncertain politicians are restrictive. Basically, every unofficial group could be dangerous. That is the real reason for the house churches' current sensitive situation. A leading Party member once asked me "Where did Christianity flee to, when we tried to destroy it?" "Into the hearts of the people,..........

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The Worldwide...Waffle? -Ian Downs Contemporaries of Columbus were convinced that the world was flat like a pancake. Of course, his historic voyage of 1492 disproved this idea. But-it has taken over 450 years for those focused on missions to abandon the pancake theory!! "What!" you say, "How could this be?" Here, let me explain: Mission-minded people have thought for a long time that the world was like a pancake, and the Gospel was like the syrup. As long as you poured on enough syrup, eventually the whole pancake would be covered with it. So they thought that, as long as they kept sending missionaries and getting people saved, the Gospel would one day fill the whole earth. Sounds good, right? Contrary to this theory, after hundreds of years of sending missionaries and mission money to Africa, we are seeing that some of the continent is very Christian, while other parts are still quite resistant to the Gospel. Why? It's because the earth is not a pancake but a waffle! A waffle has pockets that the syrup can fill, but each pocket is surrounded by barriers. That's what's happening with the Gospel; it is filling certain areas of the world, but it is not crossing the barriers to reach all the pockets of people (people groups). The nature of these barriers may be linguistic, religious, racial, social, economic, or something else. How many pockets or groups of people are there in the world? An estimated 24,000! That's like a square waffle that has 156 x 156 pockets. I hope you're hungry. How many people groups have not been reached? Around 8,000-quite a sizeable bite. How can we reach these 8,000 yet to be impacted with the power of the Gospel? We must focus on how to overcome the barriers that separate these people from Christ. We need to insert the Gospel into each pocket, and that requires prayer, and strategy, and going to the very corners of the waffle-I mean-earth! That's why I have come to the U. S. Center for World Mission. I want to participate in this exciting, strategic task. We won't stop until every barrier has been overrun and every pocket has been filled with God's glory!

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From HANS-GEORG & MARGRET (Germany) Dear Friends, Greetings from Leichlingen/Germany - for the last time. We can almost count the hours until we leave the Rhine ara of Germany to cross the (now abolished) border to Austria. Every day we have visitors & friends coming to our home to say farewell & it feels again a bit like the horrible goodbye from Papua New Guinea...having to pull out our roots again. Yet we think it's great and above all the right time to get back into the work we were called to do. Last Thursaday Hans had to take a funeral service for a dear brother from our church here. Perhaps some of you might have heard of that tragic accident in Norway where a waterplane capsized in the Geiranger Fjord and four German tourists drowned. Two of them, friends of ours whose kids used to come quite frequently to our home. Also because the victims were leading one one of the biggest Christian Old Peoples Homes (520 inhabitants) in our area the loss is felt very heavily and we are very sad. On Thursday we'll pack our belongings in a truck & on Friday, 24/7 we hope to be on the road to Vienna.....................

October 1998 ........Our kids find it quite hard at school since the level there is considerable higher from what they are used in Germany. We would very much value your prayers for them. As co-workers in this small Evangelical Church we are working with we try to get to know our brothers and sisters. All in all it's really a start from scratch again and we hope to be flexible enough to get to the heart of the people we work with. ___________________________________________

From Martin in the Ivory Coast (March 1998) ............. Another incident we�ve had here recently is when a thief tried to break into one of the staff houses, several times. Eventually he was spotted by the Africans who work here, and they chased him, found out where he lived, and eventually caught him. They then brought him back to the school and proceeded to beat him out in the middle of the compound where the students, and a lot of the local village, could see what was going on! Apparently this is the African way of dealing with a �voleur� partly because they don�t trust the police to do their job properly, but it was quite shocking to watch and some of our staff finally stepped in and took the thief off to the police in town. We were told later that the thief had got away very lightly with the sort of beating he was given, as normally they receive much worse! That was yet another experience of African culture to remember................

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