Who Was Lottie Moon?
by Pat Northcutt
Find a believer discipled as a Southern Baptist and you find someone who has sound Bible knowledge (Baptists emphasize scripture), who believes in the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, and who trusts that the commands given millennia ago still apply.
Commands? Yes, like “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.” Like “Love one another.” Like, “Go and teach all nations.”
While missionaries from other church groups may have to support themselves and ask for donations, missionaries commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention are supported by donations given by all the churches in the SBC. This allows missionaries to focus on fulfilling their mission, knowing God is using thousands of believers to take care of their needs.
Lottie Moon is one of our fiercest missionary heroes, and one of the best known. Born into a wealthy and devout Virginia family in 1840, Charlotte Digges Moon was not fond of going to church. Tired of eating cold food after church, she even pretended to be ill one Sunday so she could stay home and prepare a hot meal for her family. Her parents were not pleased! (Note a stubborn chin in her pictures: yes she was rebellious and headstrong.)
It wasn’t until she was 18 and a student at Hollins University that she came to believe in Jesus. Graduating in 1861 with a Master of Arts degree, she taught at female academies in Kentucky and Georgia after the Civil War. Lottie felt drawn to missionary work and saw her younger sister go to north China as the first single woman Baptist missionary in 1872. In 1873, the Foreign Mission Board appointed Lottie as a missionary to China also, and she joined her sister at the North China Mission Station. When her sister returned home for health reasons, Lottie remained.
While teaching in a boys school, Lottie made visits to outlying villages with missionary wives and found a passion for evangelism. Most of the mission work was done by married men—but in China, only women could reach women. Perfect.
Lottie gave up teaching and moved into China’s interior to evangelize full-time, leading hundreds to Christ. Her letters home and articles she wrote carried her plea for more missionaries. She encouraged Southern Baptist women to organize mission societies in local churches to help support additional missionaries, and even become missionaries themselves.
She took two furloughs, and argued for regular furloughs every 10 years for missionaries. She lived through the First Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion and the Chinese Nationalist uprising. She begged for more money from the mission board to help the people around her who were starving, but the board could not help. She shared what she had with anyone in need around her, and in 1912, weighing only 50 pounds, she was heading home at the insistence of fellow missionaries—but died Christmas Eve of 1912 in the harbor of Kobe, Japan.
“If I had a thousand lives, I would give them all for the women of China,” she said. This remarkable woman who learned Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Chinese; who started many of the schools in China in which she taught; who ignited mission awareness and dedication for the entire Southern Baptist denomination, has left a great legacy of commitment to and support of missions. Tiny but mighty, Lottie Moon’s example continues to inspire.
