The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Missionary Century
Lottie Moon
1840–1912 · American
Four feet three inches tall, thirty-nine years in China, and she starved to death rather than eat while her neighbors did not.
The life
Lottie Moon was one of the first Southern women to earn a master's degree, and she taught school until she followed her sister to China in 1873. She found the mission's approach useless — foreigners in foreign clothes waiting for people to come to them — so she moved inland to Pingtu, put on Chinese dress, ate Chinese food, and let village women come and stare and ask questions until they trusted her. Her letters home were blunt: send more workers, pay them, and stop leaving them alone.
One of them proposed that Southern Baptist women take up a special offering at Christmas for missions; they did, and they still do, under her name. When famine came, and then the upheaval after the 1911 revolution, she gave away her food and her salary. She died in 1912 aboard a ship taking her home, weighing about fifty pounds.