Lottie Moon
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Charlotte Digges "Lottie" Moon (December 12, 1840 – December 24, 1912) was a Southern Baptist missionary to China with the American Southern Baptist Mission who spent nearly forty years (1873-1912) helping the Chinese. As a teacher and evangelist she laid a foundation for traditionally solid support for missions among Baptists in America.
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[edit] Virginia plantation roots
Moon was born to affluent parents who were staunch Baptists, Anna Maria Barclay and Edward Harris Moon. She grew up (to her full height of 4 feet 3 inches) on the family's ancestral fifteen-hundred-acre slave-labor tobacco plantation called Viewmont, in Albemarle County, Virginia. Lottie was third in a family of five girls and two boys. Lottie was only thirteen when her father died in a riverboat accident.
[edit] A remarkable education for a woman
The Moon family valued education, and at age fourteen Lottie went to school at the Baptist-affiliated Virginia Female Seminary [e.g. high school] (later Hollins Institute) and Albemarle Female Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia, Moon received in 1861 one of the first master of arts degrees awarded to a woman by a southern institution. She was especially noted for her education. While still at home, she tutored extensively. She spoke numerous languages: Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish. She was also fluent in reading Hebrew. Later, she would become expert at Chinese.
[edit] Spiritual awakening
A spirited and outspoken girl, Lottie was indifferent to her Christian upbringing until her late teens. She underwent a spiritual awakening at the age of eighteen, after a series of revivals on the college campus.
There were very few opportunities for educated females in the mid-1800s, though her older sister Orianna became a physician and served as a Confederate Army doctor during the American Civil War. Lottie helped her mother maintain Viewmont during the war. Although she had several suitors, Moon was uninterested in marriage, feeling called to foreign mission work, specifically in the Far East. The field was still nearly closed to single women, however, and Moon reluctantly settled into a teaching career. After the war, Lottie taught at female academies first in Danville, Kentucky, and Cartersville, Georgia, where she and her sister opened a school for young girls in 1871. This was called the Cartersville Female High School. There she joined the First Baptist Church and ministered to the poor and impoverished families of Bartow County. The school was thriving academically (though not financially) under her leadership as associate principal when she felt called to follow her sister to China as a missionary. To the family’s surprise, Lottie’s younger sister Edmonia had accepted a call to go to North China in 1872. Lottie followed a year later. She was thirty-three years old.
By 1873 the Southern Baptist Convention had relaxed its policy against sending single women into the mission field, and on July 7 the Foreign Mission Board officially appointed Moon as a missionary to China.
[edit] Missionary work in China
| Part of a series on Protestant missions to China |
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Missionary agencies |
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Pivotal events |
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Chinese Protestants |
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Lottie joined her sister at the North China Mission Station in the treaty port of Dengzhou, and began her ministry by teaching in a girls school—but while accompanying some of the seasoned married women on “country visits” from village to village outside the bigger cities, she discovered her passion: direct evangelism. Her sister “Eddie” had to return home because she was unable to withstand the rigors of this life. Edmonia didn’t last as a missionary, but Lottie did. Most mission work at that time was done by married men. But the wives of China missionaries T. P. Crawford and Landrum Holmes had discovered an important reality: Only women could reach Chinese women, and they needed help. Very soon, Lottie became frustrated. She became convinced that her talent was being wasted and could be better put to use in evangelism and church planting. She had come to China to "go out among the millions" as an evangelist, only to find herself relegated to teaching a school of forty "unstudious" children. Lottie felt that she was chained down, unable to be used as God had called her. She viewed herself as an oppressed class - single women missionaries - and her writings were an appeal on behalf of all those who were facing similar situations in their ministries. In the article The Woman's Question Again, published in 1883, Lottie wrote:
“"Can we wonder at the mortal weariness and disgust, the sense of wasted powers and the conviction that her life is a failure, that comes over a woman when, instead of the ever broadening activities that she had planned, she finds herself tied down to the petty work of teaching a few girls?"
Lottie waged a slow, respectful, but relentless campaign to give women missionaries the freedom to minister and have an equal voice in mission proceedings. A prolific writer, she corresponded frequently with H. A. Tupper, head of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, informing him of the realities of mission work and the desperate need for more workers—women and men. She encouraged Southern Baptist women to organize mission societies in the local churches to help support additional missionary candidates—and to consider coming themselves. Many of her letters appeared as articles in denominational publications. Catching her vision, Southern Baptist women organized Women’s Missionary Unions (WMU) and even Sunbeam Bands for children to promote missions and collect funds to support missions. The first “Christmas offering for missions” in 1888 collected over $3,315, enough to send three new missionaries to China.
[edit] Cultural sensitivity
Raised in a family “of culture and means,” Lottie at first thought of the Chinese as an inferior people, and insisted on wearing American clothes to maintain a degree of distance from these “heathen” people. But gradually she came to realize that the more she shed her westernized trappings and identified with the Chinese people, the more their simple curiosity about foreigners (and sometimes rejection) turned into genuine interest in the Gospel. She began wearing Chinese clothes, adopted Chinese customs, learned to be sensitive to Chinese culture, and came to respect and admire Chinese culture and learning. In turn she was deeply loved and revered by the Chinese people.
[edit] Expanded work
In 1885, at the age of forty-five, Moon gave up teaching and moved into the interior to evangelize full-time in the area of P'ingtu. Lottie extended her work into the interior, especially at P’ingtu and Hwangshien, until additional missionaries arrived to carry on the work.
Moon's converts numbered in the hundreds, and the many letters she penned to the Foreign Mission Board and Baptist publications poignantly described the life of a missionary and pleaded the "desperate need" for more missionaries, which the poorly funded board could not provide. Then, in 1887, Moon wrote to the Foreign Mission Journal and proposed that the week before Christmas be established as a time of giving to foreign missions, and she dared Baptists to ignore this financial responsibility. The Woman's Missionary Union, an auxiliary to the Southern Baptist Convention, was established the next year and collected enough money during the first Christmas to send three missionaries to China.
Only then did she allow herself to take a much-needed furlough, the first in 1892, and the second in 1902. Lottie was very concerned that her fellow missionaries were burning out from lack of rest and renewal and going to early graves. The mindset back home was “go to the mission field, die on the mission field.” Many never expected to see their friends and families again. Lottie argued that regular furloughs every ten years would literally extend the lives and effectiveness of seasoned missionaries. (Today, Southern Baptist missionaries get a furlough roughly every four years.) She also took a month of rest during the year.
[edit] War, conflict, and scarcity
Throughout her missionary career, Moon faced plague, famine, revolution, and war. The Sino-Japanese War (1894), the Boxer Rebellion (1900), and the Chinese Nationalist uprising (that overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1911) all profoundly affected mission work. Famine and disease took their toll, as well. When Lottie returned from her second furlough in 1904, she agonized over the suffering of the people who were literally starving to death all around her. She pled for more money and more resources, but the mission board was heavily in debt and could send nothing. Mission salaries were voluntarily cut. Unknown to her fellow missionaries, Lottie Moon—the Southern belle who was once described as “overindulged and under-disciplined”—shared her own meager money and food with any and everyone around her, severely affecting both her physical and mental health. In 1912, she only weighed fifty pounds. Alarmed, fellow missionaries arranged for her to be sent back home to the United States with a missionary companion. However, Moon died at the age of seventy-two, on December 24, 1912, in the harbor of Kobe, Japan, while en route to America. The official cause of her death was listed as dementia. Her body was cremated and the remains returned to loved ones in Virginia for burial.
[edit] Modern legacy
Since her sacrificial death at the age of seventy-two, Lottie Moon has come to personify the missionary spirit for Southern Baptists and many other Christians, as well. The annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Missions has raised a total of $1.5 billion for missions since 1888 and finances half the entire Southern Baptist missions budget every year.
Renamed the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions in 1918, it has since raised an amount that averages more than $20 million annually.
[edit] Trivia
- Lottie Moon the missionary should not be confused with the Confederate spy by the same name: (Lottie Moon (spy)) from Oxford, Ohio.
[edit] See Also
[edit] External links
[edit] Further reading
- Allen, Catherine B. (1980). The New Lottie Moon Story. Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press.
- Harper, Keith, ed. (2002). Send the Light: Lottie Moon's Letters and Other Writings. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press.
- Hyatt, Irwin T. (1976). Our Ordered Lives Confess: Three Nineteenth-Century American Missionaries in East Shantung. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Moon, Charlotte Digges |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Moon, Lottie |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Missionary in China |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1840 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Charlottesville, Virginia, USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1912 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Kobe, Japan |
