Global Mission Mondays

A couple months ago our church started to pray for a different country each week at our Monday night prayer meetings.  I had the idea after seeing Joshua Project "Unreached People of the Day" widgets on various blogs and I thought it would be cool for our church to expand our understanding of the global church and global missions. 

Tonight we will be praying for Mongolia and I thought I'd start posting the countries we are praying for and the info about them that I share at the prayer meeting.  I get most of the information from Wikipedia and the Joshua Project.

Mongolia has about 2.7 million people.  30% of them are nomadic or semi-nomadic, 40% live in the capital where crime is a major problem and a third live in poverty with 20% of the population living on less that $1.25 a day.  The main religion is Tibetan Buddhism with around half of the population adhering to a form of it.  About 40% claim no religious affiliation, 4% are Muslim, and probably around 1% are Christian with the rest being various Shamanist religions.  This adds up to 99% of the population needing the gospel.  There are about 26 ethnic groups, most of which do not have a bible translated into their language.  The religious were persecuted before and during the Soviet Union (even though Mongolia wasn't part of the USSR it was influenced by the Soviet policies) and only since 1991 has there been any freedom of religion in Mongolia.