Lottie Moon is an SBC fixture in the weeks leading up to Christmas because of the international missions offering in her name. She was born Charlotte Diggs Moon on December 12, 1840, in Albemarle County, Virginia, and died December 24, 1912, in the port of Kobe, Japan, on board the ship Manchuria, headed from China to San Francisco. She intrigues us with her tenacious personality, her curiously tiny stature contrasted with her outsized legacy, and the hagiography surrounding her cause of death.
This year, the Lottie Moon Christmas offering goal set by the International Mission Board is $205 million. My own church is aiming for a goal just shy of $100,000. But Lottie’s legacy also includes her spiritual tenacity and her greatness of spirit. Among the questions we should be asking about Lottie is the question of spiritual drive and resilience: what inspired this woman and how was she sustained in her mission work?
For those not well acquainted with Lottie Moon, she came to faith and was baptized at eighteen years old in Charlottesville, Virginia under the ministry of John A. Broadus, a fervent preacher (and future president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) who urged young men to heed the call to foreign missions. In her heart, Lottie responded to this call, although the opportunity to go abroad eluded her for another decade and a half. Intellectually gifted and vivacious, Lottie worked as a schoolteacher in the South, and was proficient in Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, and Hebrew. Broadus highly respected her, calling her “the most educated…woman in the South,” and one of the first to earn a Master of Arts degree.
She described her calling to ministry in China as coming to her “clear as a bell.” She left for China in 1873, a single woman missionary, supported financially by the Georgia Baptist women’s missionary society in Cartersville, Georgia, where Lottie had led a private girls’ school. In a time fraught with misgivings and uncertainties surrounding the sending of single women as foreign missionaries, the door was opened to single women because of two factors: the growing popularity of the “Woman’s mission to woman” ideology among Baptist women’s missions circles, and the appointment of Henry Allen Tupper, a strong advocate for women in Christian ministry, to the presidency of the Foreign Mission Board of the SBC. Because of his advocacy and friendship, Lottie was able to navigate the so-called “women’s question” throughout her years abroad.
By reading Lottie’s letters, journal, and the notes in her Bible, we gather that she engaged in several soul-shaping and live-giving spiritual practices such as journaling, prayer, Scripture study, and personal evangelism.
Her call, commitment, and the fervency of her drive toward missions work echoed in her appeal to young men and women:
Young brethren, can you, knowing the loud call for laborers in the foreign field, will you settle down with your home pastorates? So many could be found to fill your places at home; so few volunteer for the foreign work. .. Could a Christian woman possibly desire higher honor than to be permitted to go from house to house and tell of a savior to those who have never heard his name? We could not conceive a life which would more thoroughly satisfy the mind and heart of a true follower of the Lord Jesus.
This was the life Lottie was committed to, motivated by deep discipleship and a fervent desire to share the gospel. As she lifted up Christ as the way to salvation for all, she herself was formed by the life of Jesus. This shaping of a disciple by the life of Jesus is known in Christian spiritual tradition as imitatio Christi, the “imitation of Christ,” a way of sanctifying, self-sacrificial discipleship.
Once on the field, her draw to continuing work in China when other missionaries experienced burnout is exemplified in the notes in her Bible: “O, that I could consecrate myself, soul and body, to his service forever; O, that I could give myself up to him, so as never more to attempt to be my own or to have any will or affection improper for those conformed to him.” As God moved her to reach interior parts of China, he also flung doors wide open for sharing the gospel, teaching, counseling, preaching to men, women, and children: whole families came to Christ. Serious inquirers after truth walked for miles and attended women’s meetings to have a chance to consult with Lottie.
During her long tenure abroad, she herself was sometimes discouraged and drained of energy. She dug in spiritually, writing in 1886: “I feel my weakness and inability to accomplish anything without the aid of the Holy Spirit. Make special prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in P’ingtu, that I may be clothed with power from on high by the indwelling of the Spirit in my heart.”
Her love for Scripture was equally heartfelt: “Words fail to express my love for this holy book, my gratitude for its author, for his love and goodness. How shall I thank him for it?” By the next year, she had adopted native Chinese clothes and developed a strategy that reflected Christ’s incarnational ministry: “We must go out and live among them, manifesting the gentle, loving spirit of our Lord. … We need to make friends before we can hope to make converts.”
While she urged Baptists to send missionaries, she was realistic about what they could expect:
Please say to the new missionaries they are coming to a life of hardship, responsibility and constant self-denial. … They will be alone in the interior and will need to be strong and courageous. If ‘the joy of the Lord’ be ‘their strength,’ the blessedness of the work will more than compensate for the hardship. Let them come ‘rejoicing to suffer’ for the sake of the Lord and Master who freely gave his life for them.
Her appeal for workers in China stipulated a character conformed to Christ and His discipleship requirements: they should also demonstrate an incarnational love for the lost. She asked for “men and women of absolute self-consecration, ready to come down and live among the natives, to wear the Chinese dress and live in Chinese houses … rejoicing to follow in the footsteps of Him who, ‘though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we, through his poverty, might be made rich.’ … We ask them to come prepared to cast in their lot with the natives.”
This was the standard to which she herself held. The flame of her life was extinguished December 24, 1912, but her enormous legacy lives on by the attachment of her name to this significant offering for missions, one of the SBC’s great gifts to modern world evangelism. Lottie’s life testifies to her love for Christ, her utter self-consecration to work for Him, and to the importance of spiritual practices to sustain, refresh, and grow us into the likeness of Christ, and shape us by the fellowship of His sufferings. The pre-existent glorious Son, conceived as a human in Mary’s womb by the Holy Spirit, condescended to the life of mortals, living among us and revealing the Father’s love for all humanity (John 1:14-18). Lottie walked out that love in China to all those among whom she lived and labored, sustained by the power of the Spirit, shaped into the image of the Son, sent by the Father who desires all nations to come to Him and be blessed (Gen. 12:3).
Quotes from Catherine B. Allen, The New Lottie Moon Story. 1st ed. Nashville: Broadman, 1980.
Additional resource:
Sullivan, Virginia D. Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend (Southern Biography Series). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011.
ABOUT STEFANA DAN LAING
Stefana Dan Laing is associate professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School, where she teaches patristics and spiritual formation, coordinates Beeson’s Women’s Theological Colloquium, and serves as theological librarian. Laing is the author of Retrieving History: Memory and Identity Formation in the Early Church (Baker Academic, 2017). Her primary areas of research are early Christian spirituality and historiography. She chairs the Patristic/Medieval History section for the Evangelical Theological Society, and serves as general editor for the forthcoming CSB Women’s Study Bible (B&H Reference, 2025). Prior to coming to Beeson Divinity School, Laing taught courses in Christian spirituality, history, and doctrine at Houston Graduate School of Theology and Houston Christian University. She is married to John, and they have three children.
