Adventists in Mongolia poised for growth
The Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Mongolia Mission Field acquired five new properties in 2012, positioning the still-nascent regional church to expand its community services and church infrastructure.
Only established in Mongolia’s modern era since the early 1990s, the denomination has 24 congregations and nearly 2,000 members. Thanks to international support, recent capital investments in land, church buildings, and plans for community centers, the church is poised for more significant outreach, and, church officials hope, membership growth.
“Mongolia has a bright future, but we believe that if we don’t take this opportunity now to establish our school and health centers, later on could be too late,” said Elbert Kuhn, director of the mission field, based in Ulaanbaatar, the country’s capital.
Kuhn said the mission field plans to build as many as 15 community centers in the country during the next four years. “The church must be relevant for its members but for the community as well,” Kuhn said. “We want to make a difference where we are established.”
Evangelism outreach slowly yields results. A dedication ceremony of an Adventist church in the Övörkhangai Province in October 2012 was the first time an Adventist congregation was officially organized in the country in eight years.
In 2012, the mission field acquired a 600-square-meter plot of land in the Khentii Province, east of the capital, and a 500-square-meter lot in the Arkhangai Province, west of the capital. The mission field also purchased a lot and a building in Erdenet, the second-largest city by population.
According to the Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, Adventist work among Mongol people began in 1926 by Russian missionaries operating from Manchuria, China. A few years later, an American missionary worked to establish a mission headquarters and a clinic. He returned to the United States in the late 1930s, and World War II prevented further work in the region.
Adventist work was not reestablished in Mongolia until the early 1990s after the end of Socialist rule, which opened the country to religious expression. Volunteers from Adventist Frontier Missions, a supporting ministry, came to Mongolia in 1992, and the Adventist Church’s Mongolia Mission Field was formally organized in 1997.
Christianity is relatively new in Mongolia. About half of Mongolians are Buddhist, and more than a quarter are atheist. Shamanism beliefs are also widespread. The society today, though, is largely secular, Kuhn said. Under earlier Soviet influence, the government conducted campaigns to dissuade young people in the region from participating in religious activities. That influence remains.
“We want to try our best to ground our church by preparing local leaders who can take care of the church themselves as soon as possible,” Kuhn said.
—Sarah Deblois, Mongolian Mission Field, with additional reporting by Ansel Oliver, Adventist News Network
Religiously unaffiliated “nones” swell to 1.1 billion worldwide, study says
Of the seven billion people living on earth, an estimated 1.1 billion—or 16 percent of the total—are not religiously affiliated, a December 2012 study finds.
Relating the Christian gospel—and the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s message—to that population may become a missiological challenge. The “nones” (those without formal religious affiliation) may or may not know about such concepts as God and would require additional effort to evangelize.
The religious affiliation data comes from a demographic study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life of more than 230 countries and territories. The study finds more than eight in ten people worldwide identify with a religious group. The report estimates “there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe,” representing 84 percent of the world population.
“Based on an analysis of more than 2,500 censuses, surveys, and population registers,” the Pew study “finds 2.2 billion Christians (32% of the world’s population), 1.6 billion Muslims (23%), 1 billion Hindus (15%), nearly 500 million Buddhists (7%) and 14 million Jews (0.2%) around the world as of 2010. In addition, more than 400 million people (6%) practice various folk or traditional religions, including African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, Native
American religions and Australian aboriginal religions. An estimated 58 million people—slightly less than 1% of the global population—belong to other
religions, including the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca, and Zoroastrianism, to mention just a few.
“At the same time, the new study by the Pew Forum also finds that roughly one-in-six people around the globe . . . have no religious affiliation. This makes the unaffiliated the third-largest religious group worldwide, behind Christians and Muslims, and about equal in size to the world’s Catholic population. Surveys indicate that many of the unaffiliated hold some religious or spiritual beliefs (such as belief in God or a universal spirit) even though they do not identify with a particular faith.”
The findings were contained in “The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010,” Pew said. This effort is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world.
—Mark A. Kellner, ANN, with information from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life
