Voice of the Saints in Mongolia

Voice of the Saints in Mongolia by Po Nien (Felipe) Chou and Petra Chou documents the establishment and growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mongolia. The book breaks new historical ground as the first comprehensive history of the Church in Mongolia. It provides valuable insights into the challenges and high points of bringing the LDS Church to a people with deeply rooted non-Christian beliefs and traditions. It traces how the Latter-day Saints established a relationship with the newly formed democratic government in 1990 and offered to help develop their education program, securing missionary access in the country. The book documents the first baptisms and meeting houses in Mongolia and the eventual formation of stakes there.One of the book's strengths is that it features first-person accounts from Mongolian Latter-day Saints, providing a personal perspective on the establishment and growth of the Church in the country. These "personal voices and faith-promoting stories of early missionaries and pioneer members in Mongolia" (xii) greatly benefitted from the efforts of Odgerel Ochirjav, who began collecting information and pictures in 2006 and eventually contacted the authors to write a formal history. Chou and Chou also interviewed many Latter-day Saints in Mongolia as they conducted research.Like other books about the Church outside the United States, Voice of the Saints is primarily structured around critical moments in developing the LDS Church's institutional presence in Mongolia. These include the first missionaries' efforts to establish contacts and links, locate and build places to meet. Other, later, critical moments include the translation of the Book of Mormon into Mongolian, organize the first 'STET' trips to temples in neighboring countries, and the creation of the first stake. Parallels exist in books like Battlefields to Temple Grounds (Jensen and Ram, eds., Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book, 2023) about the history of the Church in Micronesia and Mormons in Mexico by F. LaMond Tullis (Utah State University Press, 1987). Of course, each of these stories of the Church coming to new countries has its own flavor. Unlike Mexico or the Pacific islands, Mongolia had the challenge of transitioning from a Communist government where religious freedom was curtailed. Additionally, the Church's expansion in Mongolia was not complicated by an extensive history of American imperialism.Stylistically, Voice of the Saints is reminiscent of articles published in the Liahona, the Church's official magazine. The book is very pro-Church and glosses over the Church's internal challenges in Mongolia. The challenges that are mentioned focus on issues involving the government, such as obtaining missionary visas. Many of the stories shared in the book are intentionally faith-promoting, which is the central mission of BYU's Religious Studies Center.Consequently, in some cases, there wasn't as much depth to the stories and history as there could have been. A level of richness could have been added to the history and success of the Church if the authors had contrasted successes with examples of struggles and historical episodes that were setbacks for the institutional Church. The closest Voice of the Saints in Mongolia comes to this is an episode where a missionary serving as branch president was assigned "to bring back 70 people that want to quit the Church," accomplished within two paragraphs (179). I was also surprised that there was little discussion of the challenges of operating a church with units bound to geographical locations in a country where nearly a third of the population is nomadic or semi-nomadic. Despite these oversights, the authors' love and respect for the Mongolian people and their culture are evident throughout the book.The book is valuable for anyone interested in the growth and development of the Church in Mongolia or Asia, the experience of the Latter-day Saint faith entering a formerly Communist country, or in cross-cultural communication and understanding. As the first comprehensive history of the Church in Mongolia, it is a groundbreaking work that will be an asset for future accounts of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Asia and non-Christian cultures.