Our own Lori Nowak dressed and gave this presentation of Lottie Moon for the International Mission Study! This is a copy of her skit.
My name is Charlotte Digges Moon, everyone calls me Lottie. I was born December 12, 1840 to Edward Harris and Anna Marie Barclay. I was raised in a large, wealthy family,
I grew up as a child of the old South. My Uncle had purchased the estate of Thomas Jefferson, and I grew up in a home built by a friend of George Washington.
I was considered High-spirited, yes, boldly courageous but in a mettlesome way. One April Fool’s day I climbed the school’s bell tower and wrapped towels around the bell so it would not ring. Everyone was late for class.
My parents kept a tutor in the home for languages and classical literature. I was well educated but was not the least bit interested in religion as a child.
Despite all my earthly advantages, including a religious father, I was a devilish little girl. To give you a sense of the Christianity I rejected my father was originally a Presbyterian but he became a Baptist when he studied the Scriptures to fight the growing Campbellite movement—In other words, to resist the teaching of baptismal regeneration. He searched the Scriptures in order to retain his views on infant baptism, and
The result was a conversion to the Baptist faith.
With his change of theology on baptism, my father became a founding member of the
Scottsville Baptist Church. He was a faithful member and a lifelong deacon. This would be
the church where I grew up.
Further aversion to my parent’s Christianity can be seen in my Sunday habits. In our household, in order to preserve the Sabbath, we would prepare all the Meals on Saturday. However, this never suited me. Instead of attending church, I would sneak off, return to our large home and prepare a meal for myself before the family returned. I was a naughty girl. And as I aged this did not change, it only worsened.
So for the first 18 years of my life, I was an object of wrath and one who violently
opposed the faith my father.
In 1853, at the age of 13, my father died on a business trip. One year later, I was enrolled in the Virginia Female Institute. I proved to be a good student, especially in literature and Foreign languages. But I skipped chapel 26 times in the last two quarters. While I possessed a love for learning, I despised all sorts of religious instruction.
I often thought Sunday, unlike home, was not for sitting in a church pew hearing a
Sermon but for lying in a haystack reading Shakespeare.
In my case it would take a miracle of God to change my heart of stone into a heart of flesh, and thankfully that is exactly what happened at the end of 1858.
Brethren John Broadus Was the pastor of my church and a principal at the school I attended. He called for a series of evangelistic meetings and prayer services. He wanted his congregation to come together to
Pray for the lost. And certainly with family and friends in the church, they were praying for me.
At one of the services I thought "I must be losing my touch," , as the service went on. "I've not wanted to burst out laughing once so far. What a waste of time!"
That night a barking dog prevented me from sleeping . I rolled over to think. "I wonder if there is anything in Christianity. I stopped believing because I saw Christians arguing with each other when I was a little girl, but maybe that was not logical," "People might argue over a game, but that doesn't mean they should stop playing it forever."
That night I tossed and turned and turned and tossed. My mind raced with thoughts of my eternal destiny and the state of my soul before God.
While I lay awake the thought came to me, “Perhaps these things concerning the soul are true.” Determined to give the subject honest investigation.
This sleepless night prompted me to go to the meeting the next evening.
I left that service to pray in my room all night. By the following morning, I eagerly desired to become a Christian. I got up early to attend a morning prayer meeting.
"My friends thought I was there to cause trouble." But I was not. I was looking for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. By the end of the day, I found Him. I was converted. And I say converted because it
was evident that God acted upon me Like Romans 3 says, I was not seeking after God. As
I was pursuing vain things; God’s grace broke into my heart. By God’s grace and the Power of the Holy Spirit, I was born again.
I was baptized a few days later at First Baptist Church of Charlottesville, Virginia after professing faith in the God I had spent my life opposing.
And my profession was more than just a verbal testimony. A family friend Remarked about the immediate change in me. He said I was different in those details of the Daily life which at last afforded the most delicate test of Christian character. I was a testimony to 2 Corinthians 5:17. “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold all things are become new.”
Upon my conversion I returned to school, to not only finish my degree. While I had
Taken many courses in religion before, now I pursued them with a renewed vigor. So
Passionate was I to study, I took every single course that the school offered!
My graduation came one year before the Civil War. During that time I participated in the life of the Confederate army, and assisted where I could. I was still a Virginia Belle at heart. I also served as a tutor for a family in Georgia.
It was at this time my mother’s health was failing. I returned home to care for her.
During the remaining days of my mother’s life we spoke often about the call of
God to use one’s short life in the service of the gospel. The question of How to best invest one’s life for Christ?—had tremendous effect on my life. I began supporting two missionaries.
As my mother lay dying, God birthed in me a desire to reach the Nations for Christ.
In these maternal conversations my eyes were lifted from the women of the South, to the nations abroad. Most around me strongly discouraged me from wasting my life upon the foreign
Mission field Thus, it took the strong pleading of my sister who had previously sailed to
China and the prayers of the Chinese missionaries to dislodge me from my successful field
Of labors. Yet, through it all, it was the Lord who was calling, I simply followed his command.
I was Educated, independent, biblically literate, and gripped by the Chinese people’s need to hear of Jesus, and I wanted to go there as a missionary. I had to wait until the American Civil War from 1861–1865 was over, and then for the Foreign Missions Board of the Southern Baptist Convention to change its reluctance to send women abroad. With few men available because of the war, this finally happened. On 1 September 1873, at the age of 32, I went from First Baptist Church, Cartersville, by ship to China.
In 1877 Crawford Toy, a former teacher and friend, began exchanging letters with me. By 1881, I was deeply in love with him, and we were planning to marry when I returned to USA on furlough, and then go overseas to Japan as a missionary couple.
It was not to be. Toy had become involved in controversy, absorbing both Darwinism and the higher criticism and rationalism of German scholars such as Wellhausen, who denied that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Sadly these ideas brought him to the point where he was convinced that the proper approach to the Bible was to “take the kernel of truth from its outer covering of myth”.
I was shattered and grief-stricken when I learned of the new theology and liberal beliefs of the man I had once so much admired and now so deeply loved. When asked by a relative in later years if I had ever been in love, I replied, “Yes, but God has first claim on my life, and since the two conflicted, there could be no question about the result.”
The temptation is great. The professor, however, now espouses theories that do not square with God’’s Word. … My cross is loneliness.—
I quickly acquired the Chinese language, and in due course settled in the treaty port of Tengchow in the north-eastern province of Shantung as a girls-school teacher. However, I believed my call from God was to do evangelism, and this often took me into the countryside. I traveled across more than 10,000 square miles), visiting women and sharing the Gospel in their homes and on the streets. The source of my strength amid this difficult work As I wend my way from village to village, I feel it is no idle fancy that the Master walks beside me and I hear his voice saying gently, ‘Lo! I am with you always even unto the end.’”
At first, residents called me names such as ‘devil woman’ but when I responded by baking teacake cookies I became known as the ‘cookie lady’, I realized the western clothing I wore kept people at a distance. I wanted to identify with the people so I wore Chinese clothing and adopted Chinese customs, which gained trust and acceptance among the people whom I loved as friends.
Everything was decided for the Chinese women. They can't even choose not to have their feet bound. But if they are educated, they may let their own daughters run and skip with unbound feet. Girls who are educated will educate their daughters and things will change. I was told no girls would come to the school, but by the end of the school's first year, I had 13 pupils.
Because nobody would pay to have a girl educated in China, I had to pay all the expenses myself: food, medicine, and housing.
The Foreign Missions Board expected women missionaries to severely restrict their activities to ‘women’s work’, but when I appeared in a village, a crowd usually formed to listen. I halted at two villages and had an enjoyable time talking to the women. That the men chose to listen, too, was no fault of mine.”
I speak in the open air in a foreign tongue from six to eleven times a day, There is unending travelling, the discomfort of sleeping on brick beds in rooms with dirt floors and soot walls blackened by the smoke of generations. If you think I am making these hardships up you should come out and try it.
Through this entire God showed me there is a process of sanctification and I was to have a greater obedience to Him. Through some painful circumstances He was refining me to be a usable disciple.
My sister and partner in the gospel and ministry returned home after suffering from a severe ailment. We were worlds apart and I missed her deeply.
There was also the defection of a fellow missionary on theological grounds. He resigned because of a struggle with the deity of Christ. I worked relentlessly trying to convince him from the scripture of Christ’s eternal and divine nature. He left the field depleting the number of laborers in China.
I secretly remained hopeful that some kind of marital union was still possible with Crawford Toy. It was at best impractical and at worst disloyal to my Redeemer. God showed me the folly of intellectual attainment and the radical need to simply follow Him. If you are going to grow in Christ you must rightly understand his word.
I returned to China heart-broken, never to return home to America, never to marry, and to die in the Orient, lonely in soul and pouring out my life in ministry to the Chinese people. I pray that no missionary will ever be as lonely as I have been.
“Let them come ‘rejoicing to suffer’ for the sake of the Lord and Master who freely gave His life for them.” In 1877, I wrote to the Baptist women of Virginia suggesting a week of prayer and a special Christmas offering. One of my supporters was a woman you know well, her name is Annie Armstrong.
I wrote many letters to the people in the United States. Discussing things such as Chinese culture, missionary life and the great physical and spiritual needs of the Chinese people. I am going to share some of that with you as well.
How many million more souls are to pass into eternity without having heard the name of Jesus?
“What we need in China are more workers. The harvest is very great, the laborers, oh! So few. Why does the Southern Baptist church lag behind in this great work?"
“I wonder how many of us really believe that ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive’. A [person], who accepts that statement of our Lord Jesus Christ as a fact, and not as impractical idealism, will make giving a principle of [their] life. [They] will lay aside sacredly not less than one-tenth of [their] income or earnings as the Lord’s money, which [they] would no more dare to touch for personal use than [they] would steal. How many there are among [us]….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.”
"Why should we not ... instead of the paltry offerings we make, do something that will prove that we are really in earnest in claiming to be followers of him who, though he was rich, for our sake became poor?"
"Is not the festive season when families and friends exchange gifts in memory of The Gift laid on the altar of the world for the redemption of the human race, the most appropriate time to consecrate a portion from abounding riches and scant poverty to send forth the good tidings of great joy into all the earth?"
"Why this strange indifferences to missions? Why these scant contributions? Why does money fail to be forthcoming when approved men and women are asking to be sent to proclaim the "unsearchable riches of Christ" to the heathen?"
"Oh! That my words could be as a trumpet call, stirring the hearts of my brethren and sisters to pray, to labor, and to give themselves to this people. But some will say, "we must have results, else interest flags"...We are now, a very, very few feeble workers, scattering the grain broadcast according as time and strength permit. God will give the harvest; doubt it not. But the laborers are so few. Where we have four, we should have not less than one hundred. Are these wild words? They would not seem so were the church of God awake to her high privilege and her weighty responsibilities."
Should we not press it home upon our consciences that the sole object of our conversion was not the salvation of our own souls, but that we might become co-workers with our Lord and Master in the conversion of the world?
"The needs of these people press upon my soul, and I cannot be silent. It is grievous to think of these human souls going down to death without even one opportunity of hearing the name of Jesus...Once more I urge upon the consciences of my Christian brethren and sisters the claims of these people among whom I dwell. Here I am working alone in a city of many thousand inhabitants, with numberless villages clustered around or stretching away in the illuminate distance: how many can I reach?"
"When the gospel is allowed to grow naturally in China, without forcing processes of development, the 'church in the house' is usually its first form of organization. God grant us faith and courage to keep 'hands off' and allow this new garden of the Lord's planting to ripen in the rays of the Divine Love, free from human interference!"
Be faithful unto death, and God will give you the crown of life.”
