Our Blog

Women On Mission - January 2024

International Mission Board...at a Glance...by Meghan Crawford Roy
                                                     
- The mission of the International Mission Board (IMB) is to serve Southern Baptists in carrying out the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations.
- Since 1845, IMB has sent around 25,000 Southern Baptist missionaries to share the gospel in 185 countries.
- IMB was originally called the Foreign Mission Board. The name was changed in order to be more inclusive of all people. The term foreign insinuated that missionaries were natural but the people they were reaching were different or foreign. The word international implies that the gospel is accessible to every person in the world.
 - IMB’s first missions field was China, where IMB appointed the first missionaries to serve in September 1845. Then, in 1873, IMB sent Lottie Moon to China. Her work would go on to impact international missions for more than a century and counting, which is why the annual international missions offering is named in her honor.
- Through the annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions, in 2022, IMB supported more than 3,400 missionaries who reached 67 new people groups and places, held 102,417 baptism, preached the gospel to 728,589 people, planted 21,231 churches, and saw 178,177 people turn to Christ.
- IMB has identified seven primary affinity groups (large groupings of related peoples that share similar origins, languages, and culture) to act as a lens through which to view lostness. These are American Peoples, Asian Pacific Rim Peoples, Central Asian Peoples, European Peoples, Northern African and Middle Eastern People, South Asian Peoples, and Sub-Saharan African Peoples.
- IMB also identifies an eighth affinity group - Deaf Peoples. Among the Deaf Peoples around the world who were reached in 2022, 2,261 heard the gospel for the first time, 122 became new believers in Christ, 97 were baptized, and 60 received leadership training. Additionally, 14 new Deaf churches were planted.
- There are 3,072 unengaged, unreached people groups in the world. IMB defines an unreached people group as one where there is no Indigenous community of believing Christians able to engage the people group with church planting. It identifies an unengaged people group as one where there is no church planting strategy, consistent with evangelical faith and practice, under way.
- The IMB Pray app provides updates with specific prayer requests from missionaries. IMB Pray lets you know how you can best pray for unreached people and places.
- The IMB Advance the Kingdom app enables churches to get their members involved with missions and find all the latest data about unreached places.

Women on Mission will not meet in January.

Women On Mission - December 2023

Who is this Lottie Moon, anyway?                                                                      

Charlotte Diggs Moon, 1840-1910, better known as Lottie Moon, became a legend in her own time.  A daughter of old Virginia and one of the best educated women in the South, Miss Moon was a petite 4 feet 3 inches.  Her voice is described as deep, rich, gentle, and musical which she used skillfully as a teacher/missionary.  But no photographer ever captured on film the animated, attractive, charming, delightful, energetic, fearless Lottie Moon, although a few photos do exist.

For 40 years she represented Southern Baptists in China.  Again and again she wrote back to America, “Send on the missionaries.”  Once she wrote, “It is odd that the million Baptists of the South can furnish only three men for all China.  I wonder how this looks in Heaven.  It certainty looks queer in China.”

After the Japanese-Russian war, economic conditions in China produced much poverty, but there were some new missionaries.  Miss Moon welcomed them, advised them, mothered them, and loved their children, who adored her in  return.  The Chinese women and children came and went in her home as if it were their own.  If the Pingtu Christians were starving, Miss Moon would not eat.  By December of her seventieth year, she was so frail the doctors sent her back to the States.  But enroute on Christmas Eve, while the ship rode at anchor in Kobe, Japan, Miss Moon died.  The memory of such a life never ends.

In 1918, Annie Armstrong, the woman who refused marriage to a China missionary so she could fulfill her calling as the leader of mission support among Southern Baptist women in the homeland, wrote: “Miss Moon is the one who suggested the Christmas offering for foreign missions.  She showed us the way in so many things.  Wouldn’t it be
appropriate to name the offering in her memory?” And so it was.

Our Lottie Moon Christmas Offering goal is $12,000. Offering envelopes will be provided for each family.

Hallelujah! We received approximately 1139 boxes of mac and cheese for the Evansville Rescue Mission. Thank you Oakhill!

Women on Mission will meet on December 7th at 1:00 pm in the Grace classroom.