Voice of the Martyrs

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brian and Louise Hogan were planting churches in Mongolia. Over
a couple year period, they experienced a time of great
spiritual harvest.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Fourteen teenage girls gave their lives to the Lord, and
they began to win their friends to Christ. And these
groups grew and multiplied so very quickly this church grew.
By the first year, we were one hundred and twenty
baptized believers. Signs and wonders broke out through a visiting
short term team. We had months and months of this
outpouring continuing. A friend of mine said, throughout history, whenever

(00:33):
the kingdom advanced, someone first had to pay a terrible price.
I awoke to Louise's screams from where our baby had
been in bed.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Jesus never promised his followers and easy path. In fact,
he told his disciples that the world would hate them.
He sent them out as sheep among wolves. Jesus's words
came true in the life of the Apostles, and they're
still coming true to day in the lives of his
followers around the world. Join host Todd Nettletons we hear
their inspiring stories and learn how we can help Right

(01:07):
now on the Voice of the Martyrs Radio Network.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Welcome again to the Voice of the Martyrs Radio. My
name is Todd Netleton. We are going to hear one
of my all time favorite conversations on VOM radio this week.
Our guests are Brian and Louise Hogan. They are a
part of y Wham Frontier Missions. They've been involved in
church planting in the country of Mongolia, and then since

(01:31):
then they've been involved in training church planters around the world,
including some hostile areas and restricted nations, places where the
Voice of the Martyrs works, so in those places our
work kind of crosses over. Brian is also the author
of a couple of books. They have fantastic titles easy
to remember. One of his books is called There's a

(01:53):
Sheep in My Bathtub and then there's another one called
A to Z of Near Death and Ventures. Brian and Louise,
Welcome to the Voice of the Martyrs Radio.

Speaker 4 (02:04):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Talk to me a little bit first. The Sheep in
My Bathtub Tell me what that means?

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Well, that book is really the story of what God
did both in our family and in the church movement
that we were able to be a part of. Starting
in Outer Mongolia, in the early nineteen nineties. So the
tagline for is really an American family with no cross
cultural experience plunges into the utter chaos of post communist

(02:31):
Mongolia and incredible things result as God shows up. The
title comes from two actual incidents. One is really simple.
We had to baptize the new Believers in bathtubs, so
there were literally spiritual sheep in our bathtub entering the Kingdom,
and that was because of the extreme low temperatures that
we were dealing with in Mongolia there and some of

(02:53):
the limitations we had. The other thing was kind of funny.
Our meat didn't come to us in nice packaged things
on steyro foam trays, but it was really, you know,
came as whole animal or chunk of animals. So one
time I bought a sheep and brought it home and thought,
where am I going to butcher this? Most people would
do it on the balcony, but we had a first
floor apartment, and so we ended up butchering it in

(03:15):
the bathtub. And when I had finished, I washed the
tub down really well, and because sheep fat is pure white,
I did not realize that I had greased the tub,
and so my wife went to take a bath, filled
it with hot water and was sliding all over the place.
I heard her yell from the bathroom, Brian, what's wrong
with this tub? And I said, Oh, there was a
sheep in the bathroom. I'm so sorry. I thought I

(03:37):
was going to get in trouble. But when she got out,
she said that her skin had never felt better, and
so we referred to it as the Mongol in Spa treatment.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Very nice. Okay. The things they don't tell you in
missionary training school is you just get there and you
learn them.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
They are legion, Yes they are.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Talk to me a little bit about the work that
you did in Mongol, because I know when you guys
got there, to the city you were at, there was
no church, there was no Christian presence at all, so
you're breaking new ground for the kingdom. Tell us a
little bit about that and about how God used that experience.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
God led our team to a city called Airdinet, which
was the third largest city in the country of seventy
thousand people. But there were absolutely no missionaries working there
and there'd been no breakthrough yet. So in short term
trips that our partners took up there in the beginning
of nineteen ninety three, fourteen teenage girls gave their lives
to the Lord and we began to work with them.

(04:34):
All of the churches in Mongolia in the early nineteen
nineties were youth groups. Older people weren't committing to faith yet.
A lot of it had to do with being really
burned by communism which foreigners had brought and everything, and
really looking for something that was identifiably and verifiably true.
They weren't looking for the next new thing. They were gunshy,

(04:55):
and so we started working with the young people. God
gave us rapidly formed them into small, simple house churches
that met in living rooms, and very rapidly these girls
learned to obey the Lord Jesus Christ, which is what
discipleship is all about, and they began to win their
friends to Christ. And these groups grew and multiplied. They
had to multiply if we were going to keep them

(05:16):
small and simple. So very very quickly this church grew.
By the first year, we were one hundred and twenty
baptized believers, and it continued to grow like that rapid
kind of exponential growth, but really among this one sector
of society, and it wasn't until April of nineteen ninety four,

(05:37):
a year and four months after the church had been born,
that signs and wonders broke out through a visiting short
term team. And that was what the older people had
been waiting for, really seeing God show up and make
his name great and prove he was who we had
been saying he was. It was the one two punch
of hearing good news, but really seeing God is here

(06:00):
to touch my needs, my neighbor's needs, things that I've
never seen touched before adequately by the Tibetan Buddhists, by
the Shamans, by anybody else. And this penetrated down to
the deepest levels of the Mongolian soul.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
You talked about the people having kind of been burned
by communism. What was their spiritual state after seventy years
of Communist oppression.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Well, almost every Mongolian was a scientific atheist, self identified
saying that it's important to realize that was just a
veneer because the Communists hadn't touched the deepest levels of
the Mongolian soul. So we were told right when we arrived,
other missionaries had already figured out every one of these
Mongolians is an onion. The outer skin is Soviet Atheism.

(06:47):
Underneath that is Tibetan Buddhism, which had only been around
since the fifteen hundred sixteen hundred, so it was younger
than Lutheranism in Germany. It's not the national religion. But
underneath that, underneath the layer of Tibetan Buddhism was shamanism,
going to the witch doctor and getting your children named
and cured and all these kind of things. And that

(07:08):
wasn't even the core that was introduced from other Altaic societies.
What the core was was what we call animism, or
the worship of inanimate objects, and that that was all
the way down to the middle that it described they
how they would answer the question what is real? And
if Jesus's Church was going to have any kind of

(07:29):
a lasting impact on Mongolians, they didn't need another skin
plastered on their onion. They needed a change at that
core level.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
You mentioned that that signs and wonders came and God
really did some amazing things. Tell us some of those stories,
some of the things that God did, because I think
there are some pretty mind blowing things.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
We had. Actually two things happen at the same time
God did a miracle, we'd been calling out, please rescue
us from this half a youth group. We had almost
all teenage girls at this point. And what happened was
he led us through a whole series of really questioning
and interviewing Mongolians exit interviews at the Jesus Film, he
led us to make the very difficult and controversial decision

(08:12):
to change God's name in Mongolia. A Bible translator had
translated the New Testament. We had that right when we
went in, but we didn't know that he had made
up a name for God. He had constructed one that
no mongol was familiar with. And so the older people
were kept saying, it sounds like science fiction. It's just
not true, is it. When they see the Jesus film,
they'd compare it to Terminator or something like that. They go, well,

(08:34):
that was a good movie too, and no, this one's true,
and they'd go, come on. And it turned out this
name for God just sounded as strange to the Mongolian
ear as calling God the Force would sound to you
or I. And we made the difficult decision that in
air to that, because we're so far away from all
the other missionaries, all the other church plants, we could

(08:55):
try something out, and we changed God's name to the
Mongolian name for God. This is the same word that
Genghis Khan would have used when he said to you know,
asked people to send missionaries to teach them about God,
the one true creator God, but also a little idol
sitting on your cupboard. That is a generic term. It
means God. And so we decided to use this and

(09:18):
explain who Borkan was. And we asked our believers from
now on in public proclamation, please use Borkan, don't use
this made up word jutan senitsuen, and they began to
do that. At the exact same week that we made
that change, a group of believers from a Bible school
in Russia showed up and asked if they could minister

(09:38):
in the community under our direction. They began to pray
for sick people, and signs of wonders broke out and
people were so astounded in there, saying who's doing this?
That was the major question of the crowds of people
to the young Mongolian girl who was translating, and she
out of route memory, she started to say it's and
she caught herself and she said, Borkhan is doing this,

(10:00):
that the godsun and Borhan, the one true God, has
shown up here in Aridinette, and he's doing this through
his son Borhani, who yeaess his son Jesus. And everything
changed in that moment. The lights went on for the
first time in Mongolians over the age of twenty and
they swarmed into the church.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
It's almost a situation where the missionaries just have to
get out of the way and let's let God work.
That led to some challenges though. There was a great outpouring,
but you know, Satan doesn't just sit back when the
church is exploding. There comes some cost to them. And
it really affected your family.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yes it did. We had months and months of this
outpouring continuing and it was It was glorious, It was messy,
it was frenetic. We discovered that God is very secure
in who he is and he's not worried if things
look like they're out of controller chaotic because his spirit
is controlling things. So that it was this glorious roller

(11:02):
coaster ride. But in November, it went all the way
through the summer, in the fall, and in November Louise
had our first born son, Jedediah, in our apartment. It
was the first foreign baby born in Mongolia.

Speaker 4 (11:16):
But he was our fourth child. We'd gone in with
three small daughters.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
And with his birth, all hell broke loose, in spiritual warfare,
in attack, in people walking away from their faith, the
church disintegrating, cult groups moving into town. It all started happening,
and for two solid months were hit by a tsunami
of advance of the enemy's kingdom, and it looked like
everything was going to be destroyed. A friend of mine said,

(11:41):
throughout history, whenever the kingdom advanced, someone first had to
pay a terrible price. And we discovered that during this
two months of attack, and we were devastated, and we
were thinking of pulling out and everything. It was that bad.
It didn't look like the church was even going to survive.
We didn't know that that terrible price could even be

(12:03):
much worse than we could imagine and could hit home
so closely.

Speaker 1 (12:08):
How closely what happened that really brought it into your household?

Speaker 2 (12:12):
On Christmas Eve, I awoke to Louise's screams from where
our baby had been in bed, and she had found
that Jedediah, who had been perfectly healthy as we laid
him down the night before, had died during the night
of sudden infant death syndrome, And it was like the
attack and the horror took a new level in an instant,

(12:35):
and I felt like I was in a nightmare that
there was no way to shake myself out of. You know,
there's it's almost impossible to really describe what it was like.
But that day was obviously one of the worst of
our entire lives, and we God brought us through it.

(12:57):
He was there with us. We felt the presence of
God in a way beyond that we'd ever felt him before.
But the actual walking through and the suffering that was
involved in losing a child in a foreign country, in
being so far away from family and friends that you
literally can't even make a phone call that'll get through,

(13:17):
to be in a foreign place where even your team
members are from other nationalities and can't relate on the
level of being parents. We were the only parents on
the team, you know, so many things like that made
it particularly hard to have to lay my son down
in a Mongolian hospital morgue that was a building out
back designed to let the cold air in because they

(13:39):
freeze the bodies over the winter, and they only bury
in the spring. And to walk into that place of
death and see bodies piled so high on every wall
broke my heart. And to leave Jedediah's body there, and
then to have to hack a grave into the frozen
soil three days later later and kneel down and lay
my son. Yeah, there's nothing that can prepare you for that.

(14:02):
And you know, I've told people a lot of times
I am really glad that God doesn't tell us our
stories before we need to hear them, because I had
There's no guarantee that I could have obeyed had I
known what was coming.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
You mentioned that in those days God ministered to you.
I think I think our listeners are our first response
is going to be, well, I'm getting on a plane.
I'm out of here. You know I'm not staying. But
did you have that emotion of hey, fine, we're leaving.
And also did you ask God? You know, God, we're

(14:35):
here working for you, how could you let this happen?

Speaker 5 (14:39):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (14:39):
We asked those questions a lot. And one thing I
had read by Elizabeth Elliott that really helped me was
that that wasn't the right question. The right questions are
was I called? Was I chosen? And did I obey?
It didn't really matter what God did with my obedience.
That's his business. My business was that yes, I was called,
I was chosen, and I obeyed, even though it was hard.

(15:01):
And there were times when, especially after you know, walking
through the grief process was really a struggle. And every
time Ryan hid my passport because he knew I was
a flight risk.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
When we spoke with each other though, during this this
particular crisis, the deepest crisis, it was amazing on two fronts. First,
how close God made himself to us in the midst
of the deepest grief that yeah, just almost a grief
that was too much to get out of bed. Then

(15:37):
you'd feel this presence of God and it.

Speaker 4 (15:39):
Felt, like I often describe it, like I was floating
on a sea of his grace. And I knew that
there was people praying for me all over the planet.
And later we found out that we would get notes
and letters from people. But I just had this sense.
I just knew that He was right there with us.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
And I can honestly say, and I don't think it's
any credit to us. I think think it's where we
were with Dad at this point. But I don't think
we ever seriously for a moment contemplated not finishing what
he'd called us to do in Mongolia. What we really
wanted to do was to take an immediate respite break

(16:16):
back to family and friends in the United States. We
wanted to go away for about three months, get this grief,
let the horrible part of it get out of us,
and we could put our game face back on and
come back and complete what he'd call us to do.
Even that was not to be. God told us we
needed to stay and grieve with the Mongolian Church, and

(16:37):
I at first I couldn't understand this. We were the
only missionaries at this point in the country who'd been
there for the length of time we had without a break,
So if anybody was due for a break, it was
the Hogan family and God told us to stay. And
then the other thing I couldn't understand was Mongols don't
like public display of emotion, and that's pretty much all
we had at this point, so it's like, how will

(16:57):
this bless your kingdom? I was giving God lessons about
Myngolian culture and saying, God, that's not such a great idea,
which you know, looking back on is pretty laughable, me
instructing God. But at the time I just thought, this
can't be right. I mean, we have to leave right
and then come back. And so we stayed and we cried,
and we grieved and we but we grieved with hope,

(17:17):
and we without even feeling like we needed to communicate anything.
When we were talking to Mongolians, it would inevitably come
up that we were going to see our son again
and that we had that hope and that was a
rock in our lives, and that was absolutely transformational to them.
They'd never even dreamed that it was possible to grieve

(17:37):
with hope. And I've had so many Mongolians tell me
over the year. In fact, there's a whole chapter in
my book called Grieving with Hope because it had an
incredible impact on the Mongolian church, and they look back
to it as one of the most important single events
in the planning of the church there, not just the
church and Airnet, but across the country. This story was
repeated Mongolian to Mongolian to Mongolian.

Speaker 4 (17:58):
I had one friend that told me, she said, I've
seen mothers loose children and they either go crazy where
you can't even really communicate with them anymore, or they
harden their hearts so much they're mean, nasty people. She said,
you didn't do that. There must be something true about
your God. And she's a believer to this day.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
Out of this grief and loss, there was a breakthrough. Yes,
tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
Well, it was at our son's memorial service. Actually that
basically a declaration of war got made and the church
began to fight back for the first time in two months.
And it's not like we hadn't prayed, it's not like
we hadn't tried to engage in spiritual warfare. But as
a unified response, we felt like we were just rushing
around picking up the pieces or mopping up spills, and

(18:45):
we never could even get our heads straight enough to
know what to do. It was the Mongols I kind
of declared war against the enemy at my son's service,
and the Mongol elders raced up, grabbed the mic and
made the proper response. They said, we're all eating right now,
and we're going to start praying, and we're going to
stay together on our faces until this is over. And

(19:10):
we went into spiritual warfare mode, and really at three am,
in three in the morning, we were gathered all over
town in different apartments, and it ended. This two months
of attack came to a crashing, screeching halt, and we
all knew it. We all went home at that point,
and from the next day on, over the next three

(19:32):
four weeks, Jesus repaired everything that had happened. I mean,
we had a churchplit where one hundred people joined a cult,
and they all came back together at one moment, weeping
and repenting and asking to be restored. You know that
only God can pull something like that off, to change
one hundred hearts at one time. How do you do that?
I don't even get it. It never happens, you know. And

(19:54):
things like that, so so many things, it was all repaired.
There were two deaths and those are still re they're
repaired in eternity. And my son's waiting for me. As
David said in the verse right before the only verse
in the Bible that mentions my son's name, Jedediah, David says,
my son will not come again to where I am,
but I will go to where he is. And our
hope was based on that hope of the resurrection. That's

(20:16):
why we were in Mongolia to begin with, to tell him.
I want to tell you about a man who rose
from the dead. This is something the Mongolians needed to hear,
and the fact that we were able to demonstrate our
faith in that under the most trying circumstances proved absolutely
essential for the Mongols to really get that point.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
But it was a costly demonstration, was hugely costly. Unfortunately,
we need to break into Brian and Louise's story at
that point. We're going to hear part two of this
conversation next week. We've been hearing from Brian and Louise
Hogan about their experiences as gospel workers in Mongolia. Brian

(20:59):
is the author of a book called There's a Sheep
in My Bathtub. We'll give you a link to that
along with Brian and Louise's ministry page in the show
notes for today's program. You can read the notes. You
can listen to this conversation again at our website vomradio
dot net. You may also want to share that with
a Christian friend, maybe with your pastor again our website

(21:22):
vomradio dot net. We've got time for a listener question
this week. So here's a question from Michigan about Voice
of the Martyr's Action Pack program.

Speaker 5 (21:35):
Hi, this is Ruth from Norton Shores, Michigan. I'm interested
in the Action Pack program and I was wondering whether
or not it's actually more cost effective to send thirty
dollars and have VOM fill the action pack instead of
us filling it ourselves and then sending the actual bag
to you and have you delivered overseas. I was just
curious about that anyway.

Speaker 1 (21:55):
Thank you, Hey, Ruth, thank you for calling from Michigan.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the Action
Pack program, what the Action packs are is a specially
made plastic bag. We ask our readers and listeners to
fill those bags with aid for Christians in need. These
are things like clothing items, maybe a towel, maybe a blanket,
maybe a bar of soap, and then you send them

(22:17):
to us here in Barlsvillo, Oklahoma. We put them in
a shipping container and deliver them overseas.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
Right now.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
These packs are going to Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan. If
you want to know more about this, you can find
it at Persecution dot com. Slash Action Packs Persecution dot
Com Slash Action Packs Ruth, There's really two ways to
answer your question, and I'm going to give you both answers.
If you want the purely financial efficiency answer, then sure,

(22:46):
it's more efficient for you to just give money. We'll
transfer it overseas. Our contacts will buy the materials, fill
the packs, and get them delivered. You avoid, obviously, the
shipping costs to send your pack to Bartlesville, the shipping
costs to get it from here overseas. So purely from
an efficiency standpoint, yes, it's more efficient to sponsor a pack.

(23:09):
But and you maybe knew there was a butt coming.
The Action Pack program is about more than efficiency. It's
about more than just getting aid into the hands of
Christians in these nations. Action packs are really a connection
point between American Christians and Christians in hostile and restricted nations.
When you pack that action pack, we invite you to

(23:30):
put a picture of your family inside the bag. So
when it gets overseas, that Christian family is going to
open it up, They're going to see your picture, they're
going to know your faces, They're going to pray for you,
just as we hope that you're praying for them. So
this is more than just a little bit of help.
This is also a reminder. Hey, the Body of Christ
remembers you. We're in this together. That benefit extends to

(23:53):
American Christians as well, those who are packing the packs.
I think all of us probably mail off checks every month.
You know, we pay our water bill, we pay a
power bill, and we don't think about those checks ever again.
But if if I go to my closet and take
out a sweater, if I go to my bathroom and
take a towel to go in the Action pack, suddenly
it's personal. This is something from my home to your home.

(24:15):
And I think that's especially true for children. And we
encourage families to pack these packs together. So that's why
Voice of the Martyrs set up the project the way
we did, in the sense that it involves you filling
the pack and sending it to us. We want to
encourage that sense of connection and that sense of connectedness
with our brothers and sisters overseas. Next week, Brian and

(24:36):
Louise are going to be back. They're going to tell
us what a Mongolian church service looks like. You might
be surprised to hear how their services are a lot
like yours, and maybe some ways they're quite different.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
I know you'll be.

Speaker 1 (24:51):
Encouraged by that conversation. Make sure you're back with us
next week, right here on the Voice of the Martyrs
Radio Network.