Lottie Moon

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced."

With my apologies to Mr. Lincoln, this sentence aptly describes the influence and impact that one lady, Rebecca Latimer Felton had on the young girl, Charlotte Diggs Moon (AKA Lottie). For 16 million Southern Baptists, and indeed for Christians everywhere, "Lottie Moon" and World Missions are essentially synonymous.

Lottie Moon was reared in Virginia on a plantation not far from Appomattox. Her uncle had purchased the estate of Thomas Jefferson, and she grew up in a home built by a friend of George Washington. As one biographer reports, “The Moons had money, children (11 born, 7 survived to adulthood), servants (52 in all), and kept a tutor in the home for languages and classical literature”,[1]

Tragedy visited the home when her father died in a boating accident in 1853. Lottie was able to finish her education however, graduating in 1861 on the eve of the War from the Albemarle Female Institute. When war came, one brother served as a Surgeon with an Arkansas unit and the other in the Virginia 47th Militia. The Moon homeplace was decimated in the war leaving just the girls and an aging, ailing mother to cope.

At that time virtually the only way for a young single lady to support herself was by teaching, and Lottie soon took a position with a school in Kentucky. While there she became aware of the need in Cartersville, GA through a letter circulated by Mrs. Rebecca Felton. At the time Mrs. Felton was teaching a school for young men in Cartersville and was desiring that someone would provide a similar school for young ladies. Cartersville was destitute. As Sherman's troops began their March to the Sea in the fall of 1864, everything in Cartersville had been burned except for two residences. Lottie well knew the devastation that war could bring, but she and a friend stepped up to the challenge and started a school for girls in Cartersville in 1870. She returned to Virginia for a time to care for her Mother and once her mother died came back to Cartersville.

A number of people and events served to direct Lottie's call to become a missionary to China. Her own sister Edmonia went to China and urged Lottie to come. Lottie had no means to do so however, so for several years at the suggestion of Mrs. Felton, she wrote letters and travelled from Church to Church asking for support of the ladies' groups. Mrs' Felton used her influence to introduce Lottie to the ladies groups all across the south who had joined together during the war to provide clothing and medical supplies for the hospitals at Kingston. This was a novel idea for missions. Prior to this time missionaries from the earliest protestant outreaches had supported themselves or were financed by gifts from close family.

After raising the promised funds she needed from various ladies groups throughout the south, Lottie joined her sister, Edmonia in China. Her sister soon returned to the U.S. because of ill health, but Lottie remained in China for the remainder of her life, passing away while in route home at the age of 72.

Throughout her career, Lottie Moon wrote letters home urging Southern Baptists to greater missions involvement and support. Those letters triggered Southern Baptists' Christmas offering for international missions.

Others certainly participated in the harvest in China that is continuing to this day, but Lottie Moon was one who God used mightily and her influence continues in the Baptist Churches as they participate in their Annual Christmas Offerings for World Missions. As of 2015, more than $1.5 billion dollars have been raised and the Pew Polling organization estimates that there are more than 67 million Christians in China.

One of the missionary couples who responded to the call was Dr. L. Nelson Bell and Virginia McCue Bell, medical missionaries at the Presbyterian Hospital 300 miles north of Shanghai. Their daughter was Ruth Graham, wife of evangelist Billy Graham. There is a fascinating initiative to document the missionary outreach in China - Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity.

Lottie's vision wasn't just for the people of China. It reached to her fellow Christians in the United States. Like today's missionaries, she wrote letters home, detailing China's hunger for truth and the struggle of so few missionaries sharing the Gospel with so many people — 472 million Chinese in her day. She shared another timely message, too: the urgent need for more workers and for those passionately supporting them through prayer and giving. By 1888, Southern Churches, primarily the women's groups had organized and helped collect $3,315 to send workers needed in China.

In 1912, during a time of war and famine, Lottie silently starved, knowing that her beloved Chinese didn't have enough food. Her fellow Christians saw the ultimate sign of love: giving her life for others. On Christmas Eve that year, Lottie died on a ship bound for the United States. She was seventy-two.

But her legacy lives on. In 1918, the Woman's Missionary Union of the Southern Baptists named the annual Christmas offering for international missions after the woman who had urged them to start it.

Over the years, God has blessed gifts to the offering with souls being added to the Kingdom. In 2006 alone, IMB workers and their partners overseas reported 23,486 new churches. And 475,072 people stirred the waters of baptism overseas!

Today, even among the progress and blessings the Lord has provided, Lottie Moon's call for sacrificial giving so that the world may know Christ rings with more urgency than ever.

Almost five thousand people groups — 1.6 billion people — still live with little or no access to the Gospel.

New missionaries are answering God's Great Commission call, but their opportunity to share is squandered without our continued commitment to give.