An online conference will be held on 25-26 February 2022 in honor of the 110th anniversary of the death of Charlotte “Lottie” Moon, a revered American female missionary who gave her life to Shandong, China.
The virtual conference will be held at 8-12 a.m. 25th and 26th February CST (China Standard Time) (7-10 p.m. 24th and 25th EST), and will feature nine speakers, including Dr. Paul Liu, the Director of Mandarin Studies at the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (MBTS), Dr. Todd Lafferty, executive vice president of the International Mission Board, and Dr. Yeou-cherng Bor, Executive Director of Ambassadors for Christ.
Organized by the Chinese program of MBTS and sponsored by the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, this conference aims to celebrate Lottie Moon’s selfless service in evangelizing Chinese people and to encourage global Chinese Christians to be one in the mission field, regardless of denominational differences.
Charlotte Diggs “Lottie” Moon was a Southern Baptist missionary to China, who spent nearly 40 years living and working in Shandong.
Sent to the North China Mission in Dengzhou, Shandong in 1873 as a single woman at the age of 33, Moon started out as a teacher in a missionary school. Through short mission trips with the missionaries’ wives, she recognized the village women’s eager needs towards the gospel, who could be only reached by female missionaries. In 1885, she left Dengzhou for the countryside, going alone. Settling in Pingdu, Moon became the first American woman to attempt sustained independent life under genuinely Chinese conditions.
In Pingdu, Moon visited women house by house, village by village on a donkey. As well as the good news of salvation, she also brought practical help and care. In 1887, she was invited to teach men in Shaling, where about half of the families in the area went to hear Moon speak. Moon reported the exciting progress and the desperate needs for missionaries in the Southern Baptist missions and urged women to become involved through organization and donation. These pleads led to the founding of the Women’s Missionary Union and the first “Christmas offering for missions” in 1888.
Moon remained in Pingdu during the turbulent years of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894), the Boxer Rebellion (1900), and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Starvation and plagues in 1912 toughened the relief work. Moon withdrew all of her savings and gave the money to a famine fund. Due to starvation, her health continued to decline and she died on the voyage back to America on December 24, 1912.
Lottie Moon’s life has been commemorated by both the Southern Baptist Mission in America and Shandong Christians, who erected a monument for her in the yard of Dengzhou Baptist Church with an inscription praising her love and deeds. The Women’s Missionary Union now collects more than $20,000,000 annually for the Southern Baptist Mission’s work by means of “The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions.”
