Leaving Lottie: My Sad Journey Away from the LMCO

This month I have been feeling nostalgic for the early Decembers fondly remembered in past years.

Those were times when I was privileged to preach/speak in Southern Baptist churches about world missions, which I always did with gladness—and with appreciation for the support received from those churches as an SB missionary. But, sadly, things have changed.

An Enthusiastic Supporter of the LMCO

Except for active Southern Baptists, past and/or present, few know (or care) what LMCO stands for. It means the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, which has been a lifeline for missionaries deployed by the International Mission Board (IMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention. 

An IMB webpage explains that the LMCO “is an annual offering collected by Southern Baptists to support international missions. The offering was officially named in 1918 by Woman’s Missionary Union in honor of the missionary to China who urged churches to start it and give sacrificially.”

(For information about the SB missionary Lottie Moon, see my 12/26/12 blog article about her and the LMCO.)

The same IMB webpage reports, “Through the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, Southern Baptists have given over $5 billion to international missions.” That’s a lot of money!

My family and I were on missionary “furlough,” now called “stateside assignment,” in 1971, ’76, ’81, ’86, and ’91. Each of those years provided opportunities to visit churches, especially in early December, to promote giving to/through the LMCO—and to thank Southern Baptists for their support.

A Reluctant Supporter of the LMCO

Since 1980, the Southern Baptist Convention steadily became more and more conservative/fundamentalist. In that same period, my own faith had grown in the opposite direction. In the 1990s I increasingly became only a rather reluctant supporter of the LMCO.

After 2000, it became even more difficult for me to promote the LMCO enthusiastically, as I had done for decades. The problem was the adoption of a revised Baptist Faith and Message document that, among other things, mitigated against women serving as pastors.

After being forced to retire as an SBC missionary in 2004, my support for the LMCO virtually ended in 2005. Reflecting back, I grieve over that sad separation from a long and meaningful relationship.

A Non-Supporter of the LMCO

As the SBC grew more and more conservative, being a Southern Baptist meant not only opposing women in ministry but also being stanchly opposed to pro-choice (=anti-abortion) and pro-LGBTQ (=anti-gay) positions.

Naturally, the change in the SBC meant that newly appointed missionaries, and those older missionaries who chose to remain with the SBC, were mainly those who agreed with SBC’s theological and ethical positions.

It was not too surprising, then, that an overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. And it seems that Baptists in other countries have been influenced in the same direction by SB missionaries.

Brazil is one of the countries to which Southern Baptists have sent the most missionaries for the longest time. As a boy, I grew up hearing about the Bagbys of Brazil. Buck and Anne Bagby arrived in Brazil as SB missionaries in 1881. Five of their nine children later became missionaries to Brazil.

But just as Baptists in the U.S. have been, and still are, big supporters of Trump, in recent years Brazilian Baptists (and other evangelicals) have been strong supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro (b. 1955) has reportedly remained a Catholic. But in 2016 he was baptized (immersed) in the Jordan River by an evangelical pastor, and he attends the Baptist church where his wife is a member.

Mrs. Bolsonaro’s church is the Attitude Baptist Church (interesting name!), which was organized in 2000 mainly through the work of an SB missionary.

“Bolsonaro’s faith-based enablers” is a Dec. 1 Christian Century article that describes how Bolsonaro and his evangelical support in Brazil mirror Trump and his evangelical support in the U.S.

As an outspoken critic of Christian fundamentalism for the past two decades, I am sadly no longer able to affirm a mission board and the long-esteemed LMCO which now mainly supports conservative evangelical missionaries who nourish similar believers in other nations, such as Brazil.