LOTTIE MOON Christmas Offering Raises 55% of Southern Baptist Missionary Funds

This book is dedicated to one of the great Southern Baptist Missionaries, Lottie Moon. If you are a Southern Baptist, you are accustomed to the annual Christmastime tradition of taking up the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions. The Lottie Moon offering is specifically important to Southern Baptists because 55% percent of all the money raised by the denomination every year comes from this one offering. And while most Southern Baptists know that Lottie Moon was a missionary to China, few know, because their denominational leaders no longer wish to tell the story, that before becoming a missionary, Lottie was a spy for the Confederacy during the War Between the States.

Another inconvenient truth is that the Moons were one of Virginia’s most prominent slave-owning families. After the War, Lottie chose to go to China as a missionary because it was preferable to her than living under the cruelty of Yankee occupation. Unable to live in a free Southern nation, she chose instead to live as a "free" Southern woman in the harsh land of China, rather than as a slave in her beloved but Yankee-occupied Southland that had been overrun by carpetbaggers and Reconstructionists. And thus, she gave her life, inspiring millions.

Also noteworthy is the fact that, unlike the many Southern Baptist leaders insistent upon apologizing for Lottie and others of her generation, Lottie herself never once apologized for having been a Southerner. Never once did she apologize for the fact that her family owned a plantation, or slaves. Nor did she ever apologize for her dangerous service to the Confederate nation of which she still considered herself a citizen even at life's end.

The author is NOT writing this book to impugn the testimony of Lottie Moon. She has been, and she remains, one of his heroes of the faith. Rather, the author rightly points out that while slavery was horrible, equally horrible is to judge Lottie Moon, John Broadus, or other faithful Christians of the antebellum period by the standards and morality of a future time in which they did not live.

May you be inspired as you read the testimony of one of God’s most special and unique servants.

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