Mongolia in 1990 had almost no Christians. Seventy years of communist rule had emptied the country of churches, and a whole generation grew up never hearing the name of Jesus.
Bat-Orgil Gantumur was six years old when strangers invited him to watch a cartoon. It was Superbook, and the episode told the story of Samson. He was captivated. "The first superhero that I watched," he called him. He wanted to be like him.
Years later his family moved to another part of Ulaanbaatar. There he met children carrying toys from Samaritan's Purse shoeboxes, handed out by a church. It was the same congregation he had wandered into as a small boy. He looked back and saw a pattern he had missed while he was living it.
Someone had been following him "God was following me," he said. "Since then, I have been a Christian for a long time."
What drew him was not an argument. It was the people. Their kindness, their forgiveness, a way of being together that he had never met before. He compared it to Alice stepping into Wonderland, something so incredible he had never seen anything like it.
Bat-Orgil is a pastor now, leading a congregation in Ulaanbaatar. In one lifetime his nation went from zero to tens of thousands of believers, and he is one of them. A boy God quietly walked toward through a cartoon, a shoebox, and a church that kept showing up. If God pursued him like that, He is pursuing you too.
