31 Facts About Lottie Moon

Charlotte Digges "Lottie" Moon was an American Southern Baptist missionary to China with the Foreign Mission Board who spent nearly 40 years living and working in China.

Lottie Moon grew up on the family's ancestral 1,500 acres tobacco plantation called Viewmont near Scottsville, Virginia.

Lottie Moon was fourth in a family of five girls and two boys.

Lottie Moon was 13 when her father died in a riverboat accident.

The Moon family valued education, and at age 14 Lottie went to school at the Baptist-affiliated Virginia Female Seminary and Albemarle Female Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In 1861 Lottie Moon received one of the first Master of Arts degrees awarded to a woman by a southern institution.

Lottie Moon underwent a spiritual awakening after a series of revival meetings on the college campus.

John Broadus, one of the founders of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, led the revival meeting in 1858 where Lottie Moon experienced this awakening.

Lottie Moon helped her mother maintain the family estate during the war, and afterward began a teaching career.

Lottie Moon taught at female academies, first in Danville, Kentucky.

Lottie Moon joined the First Baptist Church and ministered to the impoverished families of Bartow County, Georgia.

Lottie Moon joined her sister Edmonia at the North China Mission Station in the treaty port of Dengzhou, in Shandong, and began her ministry by teaching in a boys school.

Lottie Moon soon became frustrated, convinced that her talent was being wasted and could be better put to use in evangelism and church planting.

Lottie Moon had come to China to "go out among the millions" as an evangelist, only to find herself relegated to teaching a school of 40 "unstudious" children.

Lottie Moon felt chained down and came to view herself as part of an oppressed class: single women missionaries.

Lottie Moon's writings were an appeal on behalf of all those who were facing similar situations in their ministries.

Lottie Moon waged a slow but relentless campaign to give women missionaries the freedom to minister and have an equal voice in mission proceedings.

In 1885, at age 45, Lottie Moon gave up teaching and moved into the interior to evangelize full-time in the areas of P'ingtu and Hwangshien.

Lottie Moon encouraged Southern Baptist women to organize mission societies in the local churches to help support additional missionary candidates, and to consider coming themselves.

In 1887 Lottie Moon wrote to the Foreign Mission Journal and proposed that the week before Christmas be established as a time of giving to foreign missions.

Lottie Moon was instrumental in the founding of The Woman's Missionary Union, an auxiliary to the Southern Baptist Convention, in 1888.

In 1892 Lottie Moon took a much needed furlough in the US and again in 1902.

Lottie Moon was very concerned that her fellow missionaries were burning out from lack of rest and renewal and going to early graves.

Lottie Moon argued that regular furloughs every 10 years would extend the lives and effectiveness of seasoned missionaries.

When Lottie Moon returned from her second furlough in 1904, she was deeply struck by the suffering of the people who were literally starving to death all around her.

Lottie Moon pleaded for more money and more resources, but the mission board was heavily in debt and could send nothing.

Unknown to her fellow missionaries, Lottie Moon shared her personal finances and food with anyone in need around her, severely affecting both her physical and mental health.

However, Lottie Moon died en route at age 72 on December 24,1912, in the harbor of Kobe, Japan.

Lottie Moon's body was cremated and the remains returned to her family in Crewe, Virginia, for burial.

Lottie Moon has come to personify the missionary spirit for Southern Baptists and many other Christians as well.

However Lottie Moon was impatient with the usual restraints and deliberately moved her China mission out of reach of male authority.