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Lottie Moon
The Unlikely Missionary
Charlotte “Lottie” Digges Moon died emaciated and penniless on Christmas Eve in 1912, aboard a ship en route from China to the United States. She had given herself physically, emotionally, and financially for nearly forty years as a Southern Baptist missionary in China. In the last months of her life, weighing only fifty pounds and desperately ill, she had literally starved herself, sacrificing her own rations in order to help feed the famine-ravaged Chinese people.
Lottie Moon died poor, but she left a rich legacy unmatched by any missionary who had gone before her. Little did she know that the fund she launched in 1888, today known as the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions, would grow to become the largest source of funding for the Southern Baptist Convention’s overseas missions. In its first year the offering raised 3,315 dollars, enabling three female missionaries to work with Lottie in China.1 In 2012 alone the offering raised more than 149 million dollars to support nearly 4,900 Southern Baptist missionaries around the globe.2
From Plantation Life to Mission Life
Lottie Moon was an unlikely candidate for missionary work. Born in 1840 into an affluent Baptist family, Lottie and her six siblings lived at Viewmont, a 1,500-acre slave-labor tobacco plantation in Virginia. Private tutors educated the children in the classics, French, and music, and all the Moon children received the best possible education and were encouraged to pursue whatever discipline inspired them. Lottie’s sister Orianna was one of the first two Southern women ever to earn a medical degree. And Lottie herself went on to the Albermarle Female Institute in Charlottesville to become one of the first Southern women ever to receive a master’s degree. By the time she completed her education, she was proficient in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish and could read Hebrew fluently.
Despite her strict Baptist upbringing, Lottie wrestled with serious spiritual doubts. She was known as a skeptic at the institute, and her name was often included on the chapel prayer list. She frequently skipped Sunday morning service, and once, when an acquaintance asked why she wasn’t in church, Lottie admitted that she’d chosen to read Shakespeare instead, which was “much better than a dry sermon.” On another occasion, when a student asked her what the “D” in Lottie D. Moon stood for, she retorted, “It stands for ‘Devil’—don’t you think it suits me excellently?”3
Late one night, though, as Lottie struggled with insomnia, she made a decision that would change the course of her life: she decided to pray about her doubt. By morning, she had undergone a spiritual awakening. “She had always wielded an influence because of her intellectual power,” said fellow student and lifelong friend Julia Toy. “Now her great talent was directed into another channel. She immediately took a stand as a Christian.”4
With the Civil War finally over, their mother dead, and the family fortune obliterated, each of the Moon children was forced to fend for themselves. Lottie and a friend moved to Georgia, where they operated a school for girls. Yet despite the success of the school, Lottie felt restless and unfulfilled. Her sister Edmonia had recently been permitted to travel to China as a missionary with a married couple, and Lottie wondered if she as a single woman could carve out a path as a missionary as well, despite the strict constraints placed on women in public ministry. She found her answer in Scripture, concluding, “Our Lord does not call on women to preach, or to pray in public, but no less does He say to them than to men, ‘Go, work in my vineyard.’”5
In October 1873, after twenty-five days at sea, Lottie stepped foot onto Shanghai soil and then traveled by mule to Tengchow, where she would live, with only two brief respites from missionary work, until her death in 1912.
Women’s Work and Beyond
Lottie’s assignment in China was “women’s work”—namely, to teach young girls. While she accepted school teaching as a means toward ministry, teaching was not her primary objective. Personal and direct evangelism became her passion, and she began a slow but relentless campaign to allow female missionaries the freedom to evangelize.
Lottie often accompanied two seasoned missionary wives on “country visits” to the outlying villages. There she would share the gospel from morning until night from the back of a donkey, tucked into a cramped shack, or amid the dirt and dust of a front yard. She was frequently exposed to illness and disease and at the mercy of the relentless heat or cold. Despite her command of Chinese, as a foreigner she was always approached with suspicion and was often reviled as the “Devil Woman.”6 The Chinese peasants would stare at her, peeking around door frames and peering through windows as she sat outside on her bedroll and ate breakfast. “Have you ever felt the torture of human eyes bearing upon you, scanning every feature, every look, every gesture?” she wrote to H. A. Tupper, corresponding secretary of the Foreign Mission Board. “I feel it keenly.”7
Regardless of the fact that she was scrutinized as a foreigner and an outcast, Lottie persevered, tirelessly introducing the Chinese peasants to the message of Christ. “As I wander from village to village,” she said, “I feel it is no idle fancy that the Master walks beside me, and I hear His voice saying gently, ‘I am with you always, even unto the end.’”8
Lottie dreamed of establishing a chain of mission stations in the interior of China, and since she was virtually working alone by this point, it was up to her to bring that dream to fruition. She settled on Pingtu, a city one hundred miles inland from her base in Tengchow. She was the first Southern Baptist woman to open a new mission outpost, and she was the only foreigner living in Pingtu; renting a four-room, dirt-floor house for twenty-four dollars a year; and living as the Chinese did. No one she knew spoke English.
She often sat on a stone or a pile of straw on the threshing floor and chatted with the women as they came to prepare their grains. “We must go out and live among them, manifesting the spirit of our Lord,” she wrote in a letter to Tupper. “We need to make friends before we can hope to make converts.”9 For seven years Pingtu was Lottie’s primary operating base, although she maintained her home in Tengchow and occasionally retreated there for a much-needed respite.
Beginnings: The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering
During her time in Pingtu, Lottie penned the letter that would mark the beginning of the annual Christmas offering. Lottie’s famous letter, which was printed in The Foreign Mission Journal, pointedly held up the Methodist women’s fund-raising methods as an example. “They give freely and cheerfully. Now the painful question arises, ‘What is the matter, that we Baptists give so little? Whose is the fault?’ Is it a fact that our women are lacking in the enthusiasm, the organizing power, and the executive ability that so conspicuously distinguishes our Methodist sisters?”10 Lottie urged the Southern Baptist women to follow the lead of the Methodists and dedicate the week prior to Christmas as a time for prayer and missions support.
During her many decades in China, Lottie weathered war, famine, and revolution, including the First Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion (which forced her to flee for a time to Japan), and the Chinese Nationalist uprising. The Boxer Rebellion escalated in 1900, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries. Warned against visiting Pingtu, which was suffering through violent attacks, Lottie traveled there in a sedan chair, disguised in a Chinese man’s robe, her hair slicked back beneath the red-buttoned cap that designated the officials. In Pingtu she visited thirteen imprisoned Baptists, but other than giving spiritual encouragement, she was unable to help them. Her own life at risk, she was forced to escape to Tengchow.
“I fear you work yourself too hard,” wrote R. J. Willingham, who replaced Tupper at the Foreign Mission Board.11 Yet in response to Lottie’s continuous appeals for help, Willingham could do nothing; the funds were simply not available.
Later, when Lottie was finally able to take a leave in the United States for a much-needed reprieve (she took only two furloughs from missionary work during her entire forty years overseas), her family tried to convince her to retire. “Oh, don’t say that you don’t want me to return,” Lottie pleaded. “Nothing could make me stay. China is my joy and my delight. It is my home now.”12
In 1904, at age sixty-three, she sailed in an economy cabin from San Francisco back to Tengchow, where she was content to don Chinese robes and sixty-seven-cent, cardboard-soled fabric shoes and resume work once again. “I constantly thank God that He has given me work that I love so much,” she wrote to Willingham.13 Ultimately, though, Lottie’s greatest joy—her work—would lead to her death.
In 1909 Lottie received stunning news—her beloved sister Edmonia had committed suicide. Lottie confided in no one, keeping the news to herself and soldiering on despite her intense grief. She threw herself into her work with renewed determination and passion, most likely in an effort to fill the huge void left by her sister. By 1912 Lottie was the only missionary working in Tengchow—most of her colleagues had been claimed by death or ill health; a few of the younger missionaries were serving in distant villages and other regions. No one was around to notice that Lottie had worked herself to the point of physical and emotional collapse. Obsessed with the concern that Chinese children were dying of starvation during the famine, Lottie sacrificed her own food for the women and children in her village. When a missionary medical doctor was finally brought in to treat her, she weighed only fifty pounds and was diagnosed with self-starvation and severe depression. Her only hope for survival, the mission doctor reported, was to return to America.
In her cabin with a nurse by her side, she whispered the words of the song “Jesus Loves Me” as the ship slowly made its way toward America. But Lottie didn’t make it back to her home soil. While docked in Kobe, Japan, on Christmas Eve, 1912, Lottie opened her eyes for the last time, smiled, and raised her fists together in the Chinese greeting as her spirit rose up to meet God. The last entry in her account book, in her own script, showed that she had given her last dollar to the Famine Relief Fund.
Lottie Moon left a tremendous legacy. The Christmas Offering for Missions named in her honor has raised more than three billion dollars since its inception in 1888. But beyond that, she continues to serve as an inspiration and a role model for modern-day Christians who aspire to live out God’s Word. She compels us with this question, one she asked more than a century ago but is still relevant today: “Are there not some, yea many, who find it in their hearts to say, ‘Here am I; send me?’”14 Lottie Moon heard the call and answered yes.