The Cromwell Family
Mongolia
2014-2015
Judy and I first served in Mongolia from June of 2014 to July of 2015, relieving a missionary and his family between their third and fourth term. I preached five sermons a week, acting as a point of contact between the missionary and the Mongolian government. We occupied and maintained the missionaries’ five-bedroom home, devoting roughly a tithe of our hours (2 ½ hours each day) just to taking monthly coal deliveries, buying and hauling one hundred fifty gallons of water twice a week, cleaning the coal furnace, and getting up at 2 AM, in -25-degree weather, to feed it. We secured their home and possessions, as well as Straight Paths Baptist Church, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, while they lived in and occupied our home in the States.
From September to December of 2019, we returned to oversee Brother Togsoo’s ordination and installation as the first Pastor of Straight Paths Baptist Church. The church-planting missionary had been denied a re-entry to Mongolia, leaving the church in a dangerous position. Straight Paths held incomplete legal organization as they had installed no pastor. Working with the missionary and their sending church, I organized and chaired an ordination board of myself and two other missionaries, while Judy counseled Togsoo’s wife Bilgee on her new duties to home and church. We were privileged to place the capstone atop seventeen years’ service and sacrifice by a brother missionary, which effort might otherwise have collapsed.