Lottie Moon’s Work Keeps Giving 100+ Years Later

More than 100 years ago Lottie Moon ministered to people in China. For her life-long commitment to telling them about Jesus, and her continual emphasis on overseas missions, Southern Baptists named their Christmas offering for international missions in her honor: The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.

Lottie was single, 32, a teacher, and from an affluent Virginian family when she moved in 1872 to China to work with her sister, who supported a missionary couple. Shortly after she arrived Lottie’s sister needed to come back to the US due to health issues, leaving Lottie by herself in an unfamiliar life and place.

Other missionaries were surprised she stayed. At that time, women were usually missionaries only if they were married. However, Lottie wanted to stay.

She learned that in China then, only women could instruct girls so she started a girls’ school where she could teach. She was often frustrated that her few students weren’t interested in learning.

However, she learned about their lives and came to love the Chinese people. She adopted their dress, learned their customs, and lived among them. And, she constantly wrote back to the United States to ask for more missionaries and more money.

At times overcome by sickness, subjected to famine, disrupted by revolutions, and often without adequate resources or funding, Lottie continued. She only occasionally came back to the United States. She never married.

It was on her last trip in 1912 she died on the ship, partly due to starvation because she’d been sharing her food and money with others in need. Her legacy is that the work she did in China laid the foundation for missionary work that continues today. People are still coming to know Christ a century later due to her efforts.

For more information about Lottie Moon, click here.

FBCO has a $30,000 goal this year for the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. If you’d like to contribute you can mark your donation “for Lottie Moon,” or give online here. (In the “Fund” box, select “Lottie Moon.”)