Lottie Moon

Background and Call to China

Lottie Moon was born in 1840 into a wealthy Southern family in Virginia, USA. She received a good education from an early age and was one of the few American women of her time to earn a Master of Arts degree. In 1873, following her sister Edmonia Moon, she joined the mission of the Southern Baptist Convention and arrived at Dengzhou (now Penglai) in Shandong, China, beginning a missionary career of nearly forty years.

Into the Villages

On first arriving in Dengzhou she taught in a mission school, but she gradually came to see that she had to go into the villages to reach most Chinese women. In the 1880s she left the city and went alone to the countryside, visiting village after village and talking about the faith with women from house to house. She wore Chinese clothes, slept on earthen kang beds and learned the Jiaodong dialect; local people called her "Miss Moon" (慕姑娘). She worked to establish local churches in Pingdu, Huangxian and elsewhere, held that local elders should be trained first before churches were organised, and opposed missionaries keeping control of the pulpit for long periods.

Self-Giving in Famine

During the Boxer Uprising of 1900 she took temporary refuge in Japan, returning to Shandong as soon as it was over. In her last years famine and want were widespread in Shandong, with starving people all around her. She shared her own meagre money and food with the hungry, and this, together with years of hard work, broke her in body and mind; by 1912 she weighed only about 50 pounds (about 23 kg). In 1912 the mission arranged for her to return to America for treatment, but she died on the way in the harbour of Kobe, Japan; her body was cremated and her ashes were buried in Crewe, Virginia. A letter she wrote during her lifetime, urging the mission to use the Christmas season to raise funds for missions, gave rise to the "Lottie Moon Christmas Offering", which has continued for a hundred years and is still a main source of funding for Southern Baptist overseas missions.