“Extremely grateful.” That’s what IMB president Tom Elliff is saying about Southern Baptists’ gifts to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions, which reached $146.8 million last year – the fourth-highest total in the offering’s 123-year history.
IMB missionaries pray over a mother and child suffering through famine in the Horn of Africa. The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering enables these missionaries – like Lottie herself 140 years ago – to live and work at the forefront of lostness, extending Southern Baptists’ witness through their full-time ministry.Though short of the $175 million goal, the 2011 offering is a $1.1 million increase over the $145.6 million Southern Baptists gave in 2010. The largest Lottie Moon offering in history was given in 2007, totaling $150.4 million, shortly before the 2008 global economic recession.
“These are the greatest days of opportunity ever faced by the Christian church in its 2,000-year history,” Elliff said. “That opportunity comes because hearts across the world are plowed up by need – physical need, emotional need, social need. God is at work stirring hearts; he is changing lives. It would be a tragedy if we did not effectively take the seed of the gospel and sow that seed into the furrows of troubled hearts all over the world – hearts that would eagerly embrace the gospel if they could only hear it.
“That’s why I’m extremely grateful for Southern Baptists’ faithful giving and praying to undergird the thousands of missionaries they’ve sent from their churches, through IMB, to the farthest corners of the earth. And all for a single, eternal purpose – making disciples in the name of Jesus.”
When the first Lottie Moon offering was collected in 1888 (though it was not yet known by that name), the $3,315 raised by Southern Baptist churches was enough to send three more single female missionaries to help Moon in China. The 2011 Lottie Moon offering totaled $146,828,116.Today, in conjunction with the Cooperative Program, it helps support a network of nearly 5,000 Southern Baptist missionaries serving around the globe, providing salaries, housing, medical care and children’s education. The cost averages about $49,800 per year for each missionary.
According to IMB’s most recent statistical report, that support enabled missionaries and their national partners to present the gospel to more than 2.2 million people, baptize 333,823 new believers and start 28,873 new churches.
Elliff pointed out that 3,328 of the world’s 11,000-plus people groups are both unengaged and unreached by the gospel. An unengaged, unreached people group means that evangelical Christians make up less than 2 percent of the people group’s population and that there are no current evangelical church-planting efforts among them. Those 3,328 unreached groups represent more than 266 million people who may know little or nothing about Jesus. – IMB