Mongolia: Big Sky Country
By: Michael Hastings
Tags: Law, Mongolia, Narrative, Mission

We arrived on Saturday night and were all scheduled to preach the next day at different churches. In the morning I was picked up and taken to a meeting of one of the older churches in Mongolia. In 1980 there were no Christians in Mongolia. Today, there are something like 20,000. I arrived with my translator, Odsuren, to the basement of a building that I was told houses six different churches each Sunday. There was a guy playing an acoustic guitar leading worship when we got there. I didn’t recognize any of the songs that morning but during the course of the week I recognized quite a few translated songs. The text I had chosen was Gen. 11:1–9, the Tower of Babel. It’s a funny thing getting used to talking with a translator. I’ve done it on the other trips I’ve been on, but it seems to take a little getting used to all over again at the start of each trip.

Odsuren my translator on Sunday (left), and Naraa, the pastor of the church where I preached.

On Monday morning we made the journey from Ulaanbaatar to the conference center where we would be having class for the rest of the week, and Monday afternoon we had our first class. Our teaching schedule was 9–12 and then 3–6 on full days, with Monday and Friday being half days. There were four teachers there from TLI, Howard, Steve, Jonathan, and me. The other three are all on staff with TLI, with Jonathan being Director of Curriculum Development. There were three classes going all week and I, the youngest of the teachers, was assigned to the class with probably the highest average age. I referenced this at the start of class, and they responded with what seemed like fairly half-hearted assurances that they wouldn’t hold my age against me. By the end of class, it seemed like I’d won them over to a certain extent, so I guess they were true to their word.

A vulture we saw during our tour at the end of the week.

The purpose of the course we were teaching was understanding both Narrative and Law using Genesis and Exodus as the focus points. One of my favorite sessions was the lesson covering character change and development. To do this we went through Gen. 12–21, looking at each of the episodes in Abraham’s life in that period. I charted Abraham’s growth and failures on a chart as we moved through the narrative. This seemed to capture their imaginations a little bit. It was sort of ironic how seeing the dynamics of Abraham’s life charted out on an XY axis helped to humanize him.

We didn’t have a white board, so I tried to do as much as I could with pieces of paper and colored markers.

My other favorite session came in the second half of the course when we were looking at the Ten Commandments. The course syllabus included this really helpful method for interpreting the law. Often when we read the law we try to directly apply it to our lives. If we don’t do that, we try divine universal principles from the law, that we can then apply to our lives. The trouble with both of these is they forget about Jesus. The method from the syllabus included four steps. We begin with the particular law we want to interpret. The next step is to recognize how this law reflects God’s character. The third step is to connect this to how Jesus’ fulfills either the particular law or that aspect of God’s character. The fourth is to then apply the law through that lens. Using this method, we spent a whole session looking at each of the Ten Commandments. We had a lot of really fruitful discussions and I made some discoveries as we talked.

Our class picture.

After classes were finished for the week, Steve, Jonathan, and I got to go on a couple day long excursion to experience a bit more of Mongolia. We went to visit the massive statue of Genghis Khan that was completed in 2008. We stayed overnight in a yert in the middle of nowhere. We saw a rock formation that looks like a turtle. We visited a restored Buddhist temple. We dropped in on a family that entertains visitors with traditional Mongolian foods like hardened cheese curds. The overwhelming impression you get when traveling in Mongolia is one of vast emptiness. The terrain where we were is rolling steppes, so you can’t necessarily see all that far in any direction. But on the other side each grass covered hill more hills unfold, all under a vast sky.

A mongol warrior in the statue complex.

There’s a haunting beauty in the relatively barren landscape, and the people that have been shaped by it. What was surprising to me is how quick to laugh and enjoy themselves the people there were. They face many challenges, but it was beautiful to see their zeal for learning and zest for life.

If you’ve gotten all the way to the end here, I’m going to make a brief plea. I had to raise $4,000 for the trip and I’m still about $300 short of that. If you’d like to help me make up the difference, you can visit https://trainingleadersinternational.org/give, select Short-Term Team Members in the dropdown and enter my name, Michael Hastings in the space provided.

Thanks for reading, and thank you to everyone whose support made the trip possible. Better get ready for beaucoup treasure in heaven, I guess.