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"As we began planting churches in 1996, we kept discovering the desperate needs of these children and the lack of lifesaving services of any kind," said Jerry Smith, head of LifeQwest, a Houston-based Christian ministry that rescues children and assists families in Ulaanbaatar and Darhan.

Helping the needy is the most urgent ministry of the church in Mongolia.

With no Christian presence to speak of even before the Communists seized control, Mongolia today has one of the smallest but fastest-growing churches (15 percent annually) in the world. Christians here are gaining a foothold in one of the world's darkest spiritual outposts.

A little more than a hundred miles northwest of Ulaanbaatar, 70 miles from the Russian border, it is standing room only at the Christian Fellowship Church in Darhan. Nearly 200 Mongolian Christians have walked from their apartments through the arctic cold to worship in a small, cement-walled rented room with dirty, wooden chairs, ringed by folding tables. Much of their spirited praise and worship music is familiar to Americans, although the Mongolian language is indecipherable to English-speakers.

Such expressions of Christian faith are finally taking root in this hard land where people are largely nonreligious, shamanic, or Tibetan Buddhist. There are some 20,000 Christians among a population of 2.7 million.

Historically, church growth has been extremely difficult. During the Middle Ages there were small numbers of Nestorian Christians, who eventually died out. Small groups from the London Missionary Society arrived in Mongolia in 1817, but by 1924 missionaries had still not planted churches and had to leave the country.

No religion thrived during seven decades of Communist rule. In the 20 years following the Soviet takeover in 1921, persecution slashed the ranks of the Buddhist clergy from 150,000 to perhaps fewer than 100 (now up to approximately 3,000). "It is a difficult environment in which to build strong churches, after generations of official atheism," LifeQwest's Smith said.

When Mongolia established a new, democratic government in 1990, reformers wrote religious freedom into the constitution, opening a new mission field to the church. In 1989, according to Operation World, there were only four known Christians in Mongolia. The Southern Baptist International Mission Board went in first. Christian groups have begun evangelistic work in the major cities—Ulaanbaatar (pop. 774,000), Darhan (pop. 85,000), and Erdenet (pop. 80,000)—although there are now small churches in almost all of Mongolia's 22 provincial centers.

The Mongolian church consists mostly of independent congregations, such as Christian Fellowship in Darhan, which started in 1991. Its pastor, Bat-uljii, says it was the first Christian congregation outside of Ulaanbaatar. As a college student, Bat-uljii had an English instructor who had come to know Christ through a Christian missionary who taught her English.

"We got upset when we learned she was a Christian," Bat-uljii says. "'We are Buddhists,' I said to my friends, and we made plans to throw her out of the school. But when we went to her to confront her after class, and we asked her if she was a Christian, she responded so enthusiastically. She grabbed her Bible and began going through it with us, and she invited us to come to her home for coffee."

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January 2005, Vol. 49, No. 1