Wednesday

“Then the angel said to them,

“Do not be afraid, for behold,

I bring you good tidings of great joy0

which will be to all people,”

~Luke 2:10, NKJV~

Dr. Earl Council is home and feeling better.  Continue to pray for him.

Mrs. Della McDaniel is in North Oaks.  Please keep her in your prayers.

Pray for Kathy Wales.

Kathy Wales is having toe surgery Monday, December 14 to repair damage from a previous surgery. She will be totally non-weight bearing for two months in a cast. Please keep her in your prayers.

LOTTIE MOON (Part 2)

Edmonia didn’t last as a missionary, but Lottie did. She was a petite woman, only four foot three, but she had stamina, a lively spirit, vision, and a passion to win souls for God. Mission policies of the time limited what ministry women could do. But Lottie waged a slow, respectful, but relentless campaign to give women missionaries the freedom to minister and have an equal voice in mission proceedings. A prolific writer, she corresponded frequently with H. A. Tupper, head of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, informing him of the realities of mission work and the desperate need for more workers—women and men. She encouraged Southern Baptist women to organize mission societies in the local churches to help support additional missionary candidates—and to consider coming themselves. Many of her letters appeared as articles in denominational publications. Catching her vision, Southern Baptist women organized Women’s Missionary Unions (WMU) and even Sunbeam Bands for children to promote missions and collect funds to support missions. The first “Christmas offering for missions” in 1888 collected over $3,000, enough to send three new missionaries to China.

Raised in a family “of culture and means,” Lottie at first thought of the Chinese as an inferior people, and insisted on wearing American clothes to maintain a degree of distance from these “heathen” people. But gradually she came to realize that the more she shed her westernized trappings and identified with the Chinese people, the more their simple curiosity about foreigners (and sometimes rejection) turned into genuine interest in the Gospel. She began wearing Chinese clothes, adopted Chinese customs, learned to be sensitive to Chinese culture, and came to respect and admire Chinese culture and learning. In turn she was deeply loved and revered by the Chinese people.

Lottie began her tenure as a missionary by teaching in a girls school—but while accompanying some of the seasoned married women on “country visits” from village to village outside the bigger cities, she discovered her passion: direct evangelism. But there were so many hungry, lost souls, and so few missionaries! For forty years she kept up her not-so-gentle pressure for the Southern Baptists to become giving, sending, missions-minded people.

Lottie’s home base as a missionary was Tengchow (today Penglai) in Shantung Province in North China. T. P. Crawford was the senior missionary there, but he had a reputation among both missionaries and the Chinese as an inflexible, contentious personality. Lottie often functioned as a peacemaker, able to see both sides of a dispute. She had her own strong opinions about different things, but she always worked respectfully with the Foreign Mission Board and with her fellow missionaries. Eventually Crawford resigned from the mission and formed the independent Gospel Mission, taking several Southern Baptist missionaries with him. After Crawford’s death, however, Lottie encouraged the board to receive the remaining GM missionaries “back into the fold.”