Charlotte “Lottie” Moon held a master’s degree, unusual for a woman of the nineteenth century, and had a promising marriage proposal ahead of her. Even so, she chose to trade it all for decades of work in Chinese villages where few Westerners had ever set foot.
She was born on December 12, 1840, on a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia, into a Baptist family. At eighteen, she was converted in a revival led by pastor John Broadus; in 1861, she became one of the first women in the American South to earn a master’s degree, before teaching at girls’ schools in Georgia and Kentucky.
In 1873, at thirty-two, she was sent out by the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention and joined her sister Edmonia at the mission station in Dengzhou, in Shandong province. There, she began her work teaching at a boys’ school.
In 1885, she left the classroom to devote herself to direct evangelism in the villages around Pingdu. She learned the local dialect, adopted Chinese dress, and began visiting women in their own homes, a method then uncommon among missionaries in the region.
Years earlier, in 1881, she had turned down a marriage proposal from professor Crawford H. Toy, with whom she had studied Hebrew, over theological differences that came between them. She chose to remain devoted to China, a decision that also brought her personal isolation and loneliness.
In 1887, she wrote to the Mission Board asking Baptist women to devote Christmas week to a special offering to support the work in China. The proposal led, in 1888, to the first Christmas Offering, known today by her name.
During the famine that struck Shandong in 1911 and 1912, she shared her salary and provisions with starving Chinese people. She fell gravely ill and died on her way back to the United States, in December 1912, at the Japanese port of Kobe. Historians today question the popular account that she deliberately starved herself; medical records instead point to physical and mental illness worsened by exhaustion.
The offering her letter inspired has raised more than five billion dollars for Baptist missions around the world. Her name remains tied to the conviction that no one should go without hearing the gospel for lack of someone to carry it to them.
