1933 - Enkh-bileg

October 1933

Goltjaggan, Inner Mongolia

Swedish missionaries outside their tent-homes in Inner Mongolia, c.1910.

The Swedish Mongol Mission (known today as the Evangelical East Asia Mission) first attempted to reach Mongols with the gospel in Xinjiang, in areas accessible to the Russian railway. The SMM was described as “the largest Protestant mission agency to work among the Mongols during the 20th century…. and responsible for the first genuine sustainable Mongol Protestant church.”[1] They established bases in areas of Inner Mongolia, and they also opened a medical dispensary in Urga (now Ulan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia), in the early 1920s. Just one year later, an influx of Communists from the Soviet Union entered Urga, resulting in the forced closure of the dispensary. The missionaries fled south into Inner Mongolia, and over the next 24 years they established four mission stations “which became the base camps for a wide-ranging mission across Inner Mongolia. Halun-us, Goltjaggan, Doyen and Haitin-sum.’”[2]

In 1923 Hulda Wiklund and Elsa Berg established a base at Goltjaggan, a small town in southeast Inner Mongolia near the present-day border with Hebei Province. A year later Signe Folke and Magnus Johansson-Havermark arrived. Despite their attempts to preach the gospel and operate a school, the Mongols showed little interest in their message and treated the missionaries indifferently. In the summer of 1925, however, a breakthrough occurred after Goltjaggan was chosen as the meeting point for a Christian convention. Dozens of Mongol believers arrived by ox-cart and horse from all directions.

The presence of these believers—the first Mongol Christians any of the residents of Goltjaggan had ever seen—left a profound impression on the people there. A few locals embraced the gospel, and eventually Goltjaggan became the center for the first ever known ethnic-Mongol Protestant church. One report says, “The Goltjaggan station spread out and with its many houses here and there and clusters of Mongol tents it formed a little village. Quite a few Mongols gathered for the Sunday services and at grand occasions the visitors could be up to 150.”[3]

During the 1930s revival promised to break out in Goltjaggan. Satan responded by sending continual setbacks to the work. In February 1930 missionary Sven Skallsjö died from typhoid. Just a week later Dr. Teodor Ollén died of the same disease, His wife Maja had died in Goltjaggan from influenza five years earlier. The Christians pressed forward, and on New Year’s Eve 1933 a new chapel was opened in Goltjaggan. The following October a mob of bandits kidnapped church members Gendun, Enkh-bileg, Sittjing Batto, and others. Government soldiers were dispatched from Kalgan to try to rescue them. The soldiers surrounded the place where the bandits and their captives were holed-out. A missionary lamented:

“Under a shower of bullets, the bandits tried to break through but were pursued by the soldiers…. Our dear Enkh-bileg is dead, apparently killed by the Chinese soldiers. A Chinese followed us up the hills, where they had brought him and here the headless, naked body of our dear Enkh-bileg was lying, bloody and cold. The funeral took place on November 29th. It was one of the most touching moments I have experienced.”[4]

1. Hugh P. Kemp, Steppe By Step: Mongolia’s Christians – From Ancient Roots to Vibrant Young Church (London: Monarch Books, 2000), 522.
2. Kemp, Steppe By Step, 444.
3. Kemp, Steppe By Step, 447-448.
4. Kemp, Steppe By Step, 449.