Southern Baptist church members gave $156.6 million to support nearly 3,700 full-time missionaries in 2018-19, the third-highest Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for international missions ever received.

“Because you and your church gave through the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, you are a part of reaching the unreached in every nation,” said IMB President Paul Chitwood. “When you make LMCO a priority in your church, by God’s grace, we see the numbers rise exponentially of those who meet Jesus for the first time, of those who follow our Lord in baptism, and of new churches planted.”

IMB closed the books for the 2018-19 offering Sept. 30, and the Lottie Moon offering exceeded by $2.2 million the 174-year-old organization’s 2018-19 LMCO budgeted goal of $154.4 million. IMB also received $99.3 million from the SBC’s Cooperative Program for 2018-19. This is the third consecutive year that IMB’s Cooperative Program allocation topped $99 million.

Sandy Wisdom-Martin, executive director of national Woman’s Missionary Union, reflected on sacrificial giving to international missions efforts. She related a quote dated 100 years ago as printed in the December 1919 issue of Home and Foreign Fields from one of our Southern Baptist faithful: “I wish to seek by my life and by my money, as far as I can, to glorify God in the salvation of the lost and the construction of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, so that God’s will may be done in all the earth.”

Wisdom-Martin said, “One hundred years later, that continues to be the testimony of Southern Baptists as evidenced by their generous gifts to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. We rejoice at the opportunity to undertake greater things for the sake of the gospel.”