Lottie Moon – the namesake of the international missions offering – has become something of a legend to us.
Lottie Moon – the namesake of the international missions offering – has become something of a legend to us.
But in her time Lottie was anything but an untouchable hero. In fact, she was like today’s missionaries. She was a hard-working, deep-loving Southern Baptist who labored tirelessly so her people group could know Jesus.
Why was the offering named for this early China missionary?
Throughout her career, Lottie Moon wrote numerous letters home, urging Southern Baptists to greater missions involvement and support.
One of those letters triggered Southern Baptists’ first Christmas offering for international missions – enough to send three new missionaries to China
Born Charlotte Diggs Moon Dec. 12, 1840, in Albemarle County, Va.
Lottie rebelled against Christianity until she was in college. In December 1858, she dedicated her life to Christ and was baptized at First Baptist Church of Charlottesville, Va.
Lottie attended Albemarle Female Institute, female counterpart to the University of Virginia. In 1861, she was one of the first women in the South to receive a master’s degree.
Lottie stayed close to home during the Civil War but eventually taught school in Kentucky, Georgia and Virginia.
Edmonia Moon, Lottie’s sister, was appointed to Tengchow, China, in 1872. The following year, Lottie was appointed and joined her sister there.
Lottie served 39 years as a missionary, mostly in China’s Shantung province. She taught in a girls’ school and often made trips into China’s interior to share the good news with women and girls.
Lottie frequently wrote letters to the United States, detailing Chinese culture, missionary life and the great physical and spiritual needs of the Chinese people.
Additionally, she challenged Southern Baptists to go to China or give so that others could go.
By 1888, Southern Baptist women had organized and helped collect $3,315 to send workers needed in China.
Lottie died aboard a ship in the Japanese harbor of Köbe on Dec. 24, 1912. She was 72 years old.
In 1918, Woman’s Missionary Union named the annual Christmas offering for international missions after the woman who had urged them to start it.
“How many million more souls are to pass into eternity without having heard the name of Jesus?”
That question, ubiquitous in the letters of Lottie Moon, seared her heart as she planted her life in China a century ago.
As a young Southern Baptist missionary, it compelled her to flee the safety of the Baptist missionary compound in order to live among those “heathen” to whom she felt called.
In middle age, it gave her the strength to place her 4-foot-3-inch body in the path of an anti-Christian mob intent on harming believers and saying, “You will have to kill me first.”
As an older woman, it compelled her to give away her food so others might live and have one more opportunity to find Jesus.
How many souls? What did she think? One million? Five million? Fifty million?
One hundred years later, we have an answer: 1.6 billion people – indeed, more people than populated the earth when Lottie lived – have never heard the gospel, according to missions researchers.
During the past five generations, Southern Baptists have been motivated by Lottie Moon to plant their lives in missions by going or supporting others who are carrying the gospel light into the darkness.
Today, Southern Baptists support what seems a respectable 5,541 missionaries in the field. Today, our goal for the annual missions offering named for Lottie Moon is a substantial $150 million.
Would she be impressed that more than 16 million Southern Baptists were supporting more than 5,500 missionaries?
Would she think $150 million was a worthy goal? Or would she, citing the 1.6 billion who live precariously in the Last Frontier, challenge us once again: “How many million more souls are to pass into eternity without having heard the name of Jesus?”