Here’s what ya do: Get the checkbook out. Sit down. Write a big check for the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.
The 2020 Lottie Moon Christmas Offering® goal is $175 million. That number is significant because 2020 marks the 175 th anniversary of Southern Baptists sending workers to the nations. The annual offering makes up almost 60% of the International Mission Board’s revenue and helps to support 3,535 missionaries and their families.
I’m not a shoebox kind of guy, even though the church I attend does the boxes. Cold cash, or whatever cyber equivalent you choose, is the way to go.
It’s not marketing genius. It is the old, quite simple appeal to Southern Baptists to give sacrificially to send workers into God’s harvest.
This year is yet a mystery. Churches have scrambled to provide ways for their congregants to meet, worship, give, serve. If there is conflict in the SBC, if there is division in the SBC, if there are complaints in the SBC…we can all agree to join together in support of our oldest and the very foundational purpose of the Southern Baptist Convention, er, Great Commission Baptists.
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That’s Lottie herself in the pic, rather stern looking. I think she’s watching the arrival of a steamer full of shoeboxes.
“Shoeboxes! We don’t need no stinkin’ shoeboxes! God-called men and women – that’s what we need!”
And, yes, my millennial, skinny jeans friends, I am aware that this is not a binary choice (to use one of your fav words). One may do both. So, put your trinkets in a box if you wish but put a worthy sacrificial gift in the plate.
