The following is excerpted from the Church News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE. 

Just two years after the first Latter-day Saints missionaries arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Nadmid Namgur learned about the Church of Jesus Christ.

At the invitation of his friends, he began attending Church meetings and met the missionaries.

“The missionaries at that time really stood out — they looked different, acted different and felt different,” he said. “There was something special about those missionaries that I couldn’t quite describe.”

Today, Namgur is president of the Mongolia Ulaanbaatar Mission — the first native Mongolian to serve in that capacity. One of his friends who invited him to Church is Adiyabold Namkhai, now a stake president in Ulaanbaatar.

They are two of more than 12,000 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint in Mongolia, a country of 3.3 million people. They are also an example of how the Church grows across the earth, said Elder Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

Elder Andersen visited Mongolia in September, addressing the members and the missionaries and marveling at the strong spiritual confirmation he had of the Lord’s love for His sons and daughters in the nation.

While addressing Mongolian members, Elder Andersen spoke of their birth in a non-Christian nation and how they came to learn of and accept Jesus Christ because “they knew Him.” The most important choices in life are not between fame and obscurity or between riches and poverty, he said.

“They are between good and evil, and they are between faith and disbelief,” said Elder Andersen. “We are sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father. We know deep inside of ourselves that Jesus Christ is the central being of all human history.”

That knowledge allowed them to become the “pioneers of the restored gospel here in Mongolia,” he said.

The Church, Elder Andersen continued, grows by generations.

Before visiting Mongolia, Elder Andersen — accompanied by his wife, Sister Kathy Andersen — also visited Seoul, South Korea. There they met Youngjoon Kwon, who spent much of his childhood and adolescence in the Church after his parents were baptized in 1975. After serving a mission, he married his wife, Yeonshin Lee, in the Seoul Temple in 1995.

Now they are raising their four children in the Church.

To read the full article, CLICK HERE.