The Work
The letters and writings of Charlotte Diggs 'Lottie' Moon were collected and published posthumously, with the most significant collection appearing in Catherine Allen's The New Lottie Moon Story (1980) and in various mission board publications. Moon herself published nothing as a book during her lifetime; her literary legacy consists of hundreds of letters written from China to the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (now the International Mission Board) between 1873 and 1912, along with published articles in the Baptist journal Foreign Mission Journal.
The most historically consequential of her writings is the Christmas letter of 1887, published in the Foreign Mission Journal, in which she proposed a special Christmas offering to fund additional missionaries to China and called on Southern Baptist women to sacrifice personally for the cause. This letter inaugurated what became the annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, the largest churchwide offering in Protestant missions history, which had raised over $5 billion cumulatively by the time of Moon's centenary.
Moon's letters are remarkable documents: vivid accounts of life in interior China, frank assessments of the state of Chinese Christianity, urgent advocacy for more missionaries and for the equal standing of women in mission work, and periodic records of personal spiritual crisis and renewal. They constitute a significant body of nineteenth-century American women's religious writing.
Biblical Engagement
Matthew 28:19 ('Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost') is the animating command of Moon's entire missionary vocation. In her letters she invokes this commission repeatedly, not as an abstract theological principle but as a personal summons: she had given up a comfortable teaching career in Virginia to obey it, and she expected other Christians to take it with equal seriousness. Her appeals for reinforcements are framed as questions about obedience to this direct command of Christ.
Romans 10:14 ('How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?') is the logical structure of Moon's missionary apologetics. She uses Paul's cascade of rhetorical questions to drive home the urgency of the missionary enterprise: the unevangelized cannot respond to a gospel they have never heard, and if the church does not send, they will not hear. This argument appears in multiple forms throughout her correspondence.
John 4:35 ('Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest') is the verse Moon most frequently cites in her descriptions of the spiritual condition of the Chinese population in Shantung Province. She reports repeatedly on her evangelistic itineration - traveling through villages on foot and mule, entering homes, speaking to women who had never before heard the gospel - as the experience of seeing the harvest fields that Jesus describes.
Acts 1:8 ('But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth') is the geographical framework of Moon's self-understanding: she is at the uttermost part, and the church's obligation to be witnesses there is non-negotiable.
Author and Context
Charlotte Diggs Moon (1840-1912) was born in Viewmont, Albemarle County, Virginia, to a prosperous planter family. She was educated at Albemarle Female Institute and became one of the first Southern women to receive a master's degree (in classics, from Hollins College). She was converted at the age of eighteen in a revival meeting and struggled for years with the implications of her faith before committing to missionary service.
Moon arrived in Tengchow (Penglai), Shantung Province, China, in 1873, at the age of thirty-two, joining her older sister Edmonia. She remained in China, with brief furloughs in the United States, for thirty-nine years. She mastered Mandarin Chinese, adopted Chinese dress and customs (a practice then controversial among Western missionaries), and moved her base of operations from the treaty port of Tengchow to the interior town of P'ingtu, where she worked among the rural population.
In her final years, Moon gave away her own food to starving Chinese neighbors and died of starvation and exhaustion on the ship bringing her back to the United States. She died on Christmas Eve 1912 in Kobe Harbor, Japan, weighing less than fifty pounds. She was seventy-two years old.
Themes
Moon's letters address several recurring themes: the vast spiritual needs of China and the inadequacy of missionary resources, the importance of cultural identification (wearing Chinese dress, learning Chinese customs, eating Chinese food) as a prerequisite for effective mission, the equal standing of women in missionary work and in church leadership, the physical hardships of missionary life, and the spiritual sustenance she found in Scripture and prayer during periods of isolation and discouragement.
Her advocacy for women in missions was explicitly biblical: she argued that women could do evangelistic work that male missionaries could not, because Chinese women would admit a foreign woman to their homes but not a foreign man. This practical argument was combined with a theological one - that the Great Commission was addressed to all believers, not only ordained male ministers.
Reception
Moon's influence during her lifetime was primarily through her letters and their publication in the Baptist press. She was not a famous public figure; her celebrity grew posthumously as the Christmas Offering became institutionalized and as hagiographic accounts of her life - particularly Una Roberts Lawrence's Lottie Moon (1927) - were widely distributed in Southern Baptist churches and Sunday school curricula.
Moon's status in Southern Baptist culture is that of a founding saint. Her image appears in church classrooms across the denomination; her story is told to children as the paradigmatic account of missionary sacrifice. This canonization has been criticized by some historians for obscuring the complexity of her actual theological positions, particularly her proto-feminist arguments for women's equality in church life.
Legacy
The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering - now officially the International Mission Board's Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions - has raised over $5 billion since 1888 and funds the salaries and work of thousands of Southern Baptist missionaries worldwide. It is the largest churchwide mission offering in Protestantism and the primary institutional legacy of Moon's Christmas letter of 1887.
Moon's broader legacy includes her model of cultural identification as a missionary method, her advocacy for women in cross-cultural mission, and her embodiment of the radical implications of Matthew 28:19 as a personal command. She remains the most significant figure in Southern Baptist missions history and one of the most important women in nineteenth-century American Christianity.