Feb 16, 2022 Holistic Wellness in Mongolia
Praise God for this amazing report from Mongolia! Pastor Bold Batsukh shares about their challenges, perseverance, and God’s blessing in outreach for this community in Mongolia.
It has been a year since we received help from Quiet Hour Ministries to assist us in doing Evangelism during the COVID pandemic. The pandemic has disrupted church life and the way we do evangelism. It’s affected people’s livelihood and caused many to lose their income. Because of this, we decided to reach out to those in need. I want to thank Quiet Hour Ministries for helping us to reach out to our community.
Our initial idea was to set up a facility in our church to help people in need. We planned to prepare food and run a soup kitchen every weekend. But, due to COVID restrictions, the church and even restaurants we were not able to operate the way we envisioned.
We entered a strict lock down from December of 2020 till the end of January 2021, and although there was a brief reopening, another strict lockdown was issued again due to resurgence of COVID through the end of March. During that time, we were not allowed to have physical church meetings and restaurants suffered. This case continued until the end of September when the government eased the restrictions.
Since the permission to use church facility to feed people was not allowed, we decided to rent a restaurant and feed people. But after the negotiations, the restaurants declined our offer to work with them. It was hard to find a restaurant that would give us a time slot where we would be bringing people to feed, give lectures and have a community outreach program. We contacted a dozen restaurants and of the four that accepted our offer, all later declined as we were making plans to implement our project. We have been working with the local government to gain permission to cater food and reach out to people in need.
The local government office advised us to use our church facility, and they are helping us to identify families in need. We appreciate their help with granting permission and giving their assistance. We are distributing food tickets. The advice we received was to help not only with food but also give people health screenings and to socialize with the people. Some of the people that are coming for assistance have depression and mental health issues, so we are giving them lectures, having a time for discussion and also giving out Christian literature to encourage them.
We are now providing hot meals, giving bags of food, providing health screening, therapeutic massage, lectures, and providing Christian literature to meet the physical as well as spiritual needs of the community every Sabbath afternoon.
We are praying very hard for COVID not to disrupt our operation. As we are building momentum, we can see that church and community members are interested in joining efforts with us. It is our plan to encourage our church members, institutions, and community to donate to this initiative and, if possible, to make it a regular activity.
The project has been running for 2 months. Funds covered kitchen cookware like pots, dishes, and a gas stove; books and resources; hot meals & food bags. A total of 269 people have benefitted. We have seen positive effects in our church members and community. We have spent resources on organizing our planning meetings, visitation and distribution of food to families in need from 2020- 2021. We have organized children’s book distribution and food give out to one-hundred twenty people with the funds received from our church members and local supporters.
We are happy that our church members and some community people are responding to our outreach and are helping with funds. We hope to keep this enthusiasm and rely more on local contributions. QHM funds have been and will be very helpful to kick start this project and we are hoping to use the funds for the Glory of God. We are praying and planning to continue this project.
Let’s keep praying for the outreach in Mongolia! May the community in Mongolia as well as ourselves experience the power of Jesus’ promise: Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you. Luke 6:38
