What is the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering?

Southern Baptist churches collect the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for the sole purpose of supporting international missions. Every penny of the offering goes to the International Mission Board’s overseas budget, thus supporting our missionaries and their work.

What is the goal for this year’s offering?

Southern Baptist missionaries can’t carry the Gospel to the ends of the earth without our support. How much will you give to reach the remaining lost? Think about what you are spending on Christmas gifts. Then consider giving your biggest gift to God – through the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering®. The 2010 goal is $175 million. Our church’s goal is $3,000.

What is the 2010 theme?

The 2010 theme is "Are we there yet?" 

For the first time in history, we can identify the people groups that remain untouched by the Gospel. We can get there in our generation! But that last part of the journey may be the hardest. It will take all of us - our churches, our missionaries, our national partners, our Great Commission partners.

Who is Lottie Moon?

Born into privilege on a Virginia plantation, Charlotte Digges Moon was a smart, forceful woman who could have achieved most any goal. But God’s call focused Lottie’s life on sharing Christ’s love with China’s lost masses. For 39 years she endured hardship and danger in a land oppressed by famine, disease and war. In the end, she loved the Chinese people more than life itself, giving her own food to starving neighbors – eventually dying of starvation herself.

Why is Southern Baptists’ international missions offering named for this early missionary? Throughout her career, Lottie wrote numerous letters home urging Southern Baptists to greater missions involvement and support. One of those letters, excerpted below, triggered Southern Baptists’ first offering for international missions in 1888 – enough to send three more missionaries to China.

“How many there are … who imagine that because Jesus paid it all, they need pay nothing, forgetting that the prime object of their salvation was that they should follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ in bringing back a lost world to God.”

Lottie Moon, Tengchow, China, Sept. 15, 1887

(Want to learn more about Lottie and read more of her letters? Go to imb.org/Lottie)

How much, on average, does it cost to support a missionary?

• $43,845.86 a year
• $3,653.82 a month
• $843.19 a week
• $120.13 a day
• $5.01 an hour
• $.08 a minute
(Reported April 2010. Support includes housing, food, children’s education, medical expenses, retirement and more.)

Fast facts about lostness

Now is the time to take a fresh look at the challenges ahead and be ready to finish the task of reaching all peoples. Here’s a global snapshot of the work ahead of us:

• 3,724 people groups not engaged at all with the Gospel (as reported April 2010)
• 6,426 unreached people groups (those with less than 2 percent of people who profess to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ; as reported July 2009)
• 1.7 billion with little or no access to the Gospel
• 1.5 billion Muslims – 22 percent of the world’s population
• 950 million Hindus in the world

There is much work to be done. With 45,560 churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, the task is doable, but it will take all of us, starting with our own church!