This week's update

This has been a slow month for blog posts, hasn't it.

Last month I wrote some posts about music, referring to buying hymnbooks and my personal application of Biblical principle to music choices.

A church member recently approached me suggesting that if we had more up-beat music we could attract more people. I know this church member well enough to know that "up-beat" music to him means that we need to imitate the world. It is indisputable that the churches in Mongolia with the largest attendance also have music that is hardest to differentiate from the world's music.

I have spent the last two Sundays detailing the purpose of the church's meetings and my philosophy of ministry. This Sunday I will specifically be dealing with a Christian's choices in music. Music is a difficult issue to teach on in English due to its technical nature. In Mongolian, teaching about music will be a daunting task. Please pray that the believers of Faith Baptist Church will re-evaluate the basis on which they choose their music. The church member who brought this to my attention admitted that the Christians with whom he is acquainted choose their music based on what appeals to them which can be a dangerous method of picking music.

Please pray both for me as I prepare and teach and for the people as they listen to something that is entirely new to them. I remain convinced that music has a much larger influence on us than we imagine.

As a postscript let me mention that I found a good article about music in the past week on a website that promotes God-honoring music.

Good Mongolian hymnbooks

Those of you who live in an English speaking country, you may not realize how much of a blessing it is to have good, God-honoring, flesh-mortifying music. Christianity has only been re-introduced into Mongolia in the last fifteen years which means that almost all of the "Christian" songs used in Mongolia are contemporary songs whose styles closely follow contemporary secular music styles.

We have cobbled together the list of songs that we use from a Mongolian Christian song book only using those whose styles are God-honoring, translated some songs and choruses ourselves, and borrowed others translated by another independent Baptist missionary. Still, in all, we only had some fifty songs or so to work with. Imagine a hymn book with only fifty songs in it.

Recently I heard that the local Christian book store which is similar in many ways to the typical "Christian" book store in the Northwest had some new hymnbooks. I was not expecting much but hoping to add a few more songs to our makeshift list. So I was surprised when I went in and found a hymnbook with 271 songs. Some were translated from Japanese and some from Korean but a majority were songs I had song since I was a child that were not available to us previously, songs such as "It Is Well With My Soul" and "My Jesus I Love Thee." I was thrilled! When I asked the storekeeper how much the hymnbook cost, she said that they were not for sale. She gave me a number to call and told me that I would have to deal with the publisher directly.

I gave the number to a Mongolian friend who dealt with the publisher for me. It turns out that they were giving out hymnbooks for free. They were excited that we showed any interest and said that we were the first group to contact them. Because they published a limited amount they were only able to give us three books; however, they also gave us PDF files with permission to make as many copies as we needed. Praise the Lord for His provision!