December 1st-8th is the Week of Prayer for the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering
Please join us as we gather together each day to pray for missionaries that are serving in the mission fields. Prayer schedule is:
Monday-Saturday, December 2nd-7th - 6:00-8:00 a.m. and 5:00-7:00 p.m.
in the VMBC Library.
Lottie Moon was 32 and single when she set sail on her first missionary journey to China. Unlike most women of Lottie’s time, she was highly educated. She was part of the first small class of Southern women to receive a university-level Master of Arts degree.
Lottie spent 39 years serving in China. The work she did was anything but glamorous. She learned
the language, the culture, the customs, and the dress so she could fit in and minister to the Chinese
people. Her life was not easy. She wrote numerous letters to the then Foreign Mission Board urging
them to send more missionaries.
She battled loneliness and spent countless hours nursing other missionaries whose health had failed.
While her furloughs back home were needed to allow her body time to rest, her heart remained in
China. In 1912, Lottie Moon died on Christmas Eve while on a ship headed to the United States. She
starved herself because she could not eat while the Chinese people she loved so dearly had no food.
Lottie’s letters from the mission field prompted the first offering collection for overseas missions in
1888. The collection totaled $3,315, enough to send three women to China. Since then over $3 billion
has been given through the LMCO. Receipts for 2009 were $148.9 million and the goal for 2010 is $175 million. These funds, which make up 55% of the IMB’s total income, make it possible for over 5,300 missionaries to serve and share Jesus with others in remote and often dangerous parts of the world.
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