We support the following
Joel & Melissa Williams Serving in Mexico
Scott & Casey Tuminello Serving in Europe
Ryan & Michelle Tankersley Serving in Japan
Adam & Christa Serving in South Asia
Jared & Jennifer Serving in Asia Pacific Rim
T&R M&D M&K Dr. Clara Serving in closed countries
Will & Beth Serving in South Asia
Jamie & Aarica Myers Airforce Chaplain
Mark & Ammie Phillips Serving in Madagascar
Roy & Jenna Serving in Europe
Ryan & Terra Lindsey Serving in Europe
David & Robin Serving in Asia Pacific Rim
Marty & Chandler Serving in Tanzania
Jess McWatters Serving in Germany
Randall & Luda Ford Serving in Jerusalem
Elisa serving with Barnabas Intal
Decemberber Focus: Lottie Moon Christmas Offering
December is the month that we collect for Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. All of the money given goes for expenses to the overseas missionaries. We talk about Lottie Moon each year but how well do we know her? What do we know about her? Let’s learn about her this month. See how much you know about her.
She was born in antebellum Virginia to a family of privilege and named Chalotte Digges Moon. She nicknamed herself Deville – devil – for her middle name. She was 18 before she became a Christian.
Lottie was among the first Southern women to receive a Master of Arts degree. Her professors thought her to be perhaps the best-educated Southern woman of her time, the most cultured, and the most skilled in use of the English language.
She felt a calling from God to become a bearer of the gospel afar. However, at the time, Southern Baptists would not appoint unmarried women as foreign missionaries. Her sister, Edmonia, was the first to overcome the restrictions and went to China in 1872. Lottie was appointed by the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission board and set sail in 1873. She was 32.
Enduring hostility, danger, disease, loneliness, and criticism in China, broke the mental and physical health of her sister and dozens of other missionaries. Yet Lottie remained productive at her post.
Lottie adapted herself to the Chinese culture; dressing, eating, and living as closely as possible to the style of the masses. She was creative and courageous in her approaches, even using cookies to open doors to the people’s acceptance of her.
In her first letter, from her new home in Tengchow, to mission leader H. A. Tupper, Lottie voiced the challenge she would keep before Southern Baptists throughout her career. “What we need in China is more workers. The harvest is very great, the laborers, oh! so few..”
Lottie had heard from home about women of other denominations organizing to support missions. Momentum was growing among Southern Baptist women to do the same, partly due to Lottie’s letters, which were hand copied, passed around and discussed in meetings.
In December 1887, the Foreign Mission Journal carried a pivotal letter. Citing the Methodist women’s move to set aside the week before Christmas for prayer and sacrificial giving, Lottie called for Baptist women to do the same. “Need it be said, why the week before Christmas is chosen? Is not the festive season when families and friends exchange gifts in memory of The Gift laid on the altar of the world for the redemption of the human race, the most appropriate time to consecrate a portion from abounding riches and scant poverty to send forth the good tiding of great joy into all the earth?”
“How many there are among our women, alas! alas! who imagine that because Jesus paid it all they need pay nothing, forgetting that the prime object of their salvation was that they should follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.”
In 1888, a newly organized Woman’s Missionary Union observed a week of prayer for foreign missions and gathered an offering large enough to send three women to China. Only 30 years later would the offering that has become a mainstay of missionary support be named after the woman who suggested it.
The year 1912 was a time of famine, revolution, and inflation in China, and a year of declining funds for the Foreign Mission Board. They plunged deeper into debt and began to warn the missionaries of limited funds. The news struck Lottie when she was brokenhearted over the needs of her Chinese people. Not until she was seriously ill, did her co-workers realize that she had ceased to eat.
The missionaries placed Lottie’s 50-pound frame on a ship to America, in the hope that rest would restore her health. A missionary nurse was by her side on Christmas Eve when she lifted her hands in Chinese greeting and died.
