LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s former International Mission Board missionary Debbie Moore would gather a few Liberia Baptist Seminary students (to serve as camp staff), load up in an old Peugeot station wagon, traverse Liberia, and hold Girls in Action and Royal Ambassador camps, sharing the Gospel with the young people of West Africa.
There weren’t campgrounds available in the locations they visited, but that didn’t matter. Moore said they would meet under a tree, in a schoolyard, in school buildings, or even in church buildings. In Monrovia, Liberia, where Moore served as the Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU) worker for the then Foreign Mission Board, she said they did have a small Baptist camp facility on the edge of a lagoon of the Atlantic Ocean.
Thanks to God’s call, and to the generosity of Southern Baptists and the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, Moore was able to serve and share the Gospel in Liberia, where her primary responsibility was working with Girls in Action (GA) and Royal Ambassadors (RA), which are WMU missions discipleship groups for girls and boys in grades one through six in the United States. In Liberia, however, the GA and RA groups include children, youth, and sometimes even young single adults.
The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering provided Moore’s housing and transportation as well as helped provide camp supplies, assistance for children to attend camp and more. The funds also provided an opportunity for Moore to have Bible studies through the years with women in the churches and to train leaders for the GA and RA organizations.
“The exciting thing for me about it is that WMU work is still going on in Liberia because of the commitment of those young women who are now older women and are still leading.” Moore said. GA camp is getting ready to start in Liberia in just a month or so despite no longer benefitting from the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. She said that Southern Baptist missionaries in Liberia were evacuated, and relocated to other countries, in the late 1990s due to the Liberian Civil War.
“The WMU leaders in Liberia are still growing missionaries right there for their own people groups around the country,” Moore said.
Moore, who now serves on the Arkansas Baptist State Convention Missions Team as the Arkansas WMU executive director, said it is important to keep sending and supporting missionaries. The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering helps make that possible.
“It was God’s call that kept me on the field, but it was the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering and the generosity of Southern Baptists that helped provide the things that were needed to stay on the field,” she said, also stressing the importance of prayer support.
“The giving is important, but the prayer support is most important. I grew up in Arkansas and am a lifelong Arkansas Baptist. Arkansas Baptists have always been so generous in their praying and their giving for our missionaries, and I am very thankful for that. We have to continue to pray and to give so that others can go and be present and share Jesus among the unreached people groups around the world.”
Moore’s experience is just one of thousands replicated around the globe by Southern Baptist missionaries who answer God’s call to serve internationally.
The 2023 Lottie Moon Week of Prayer for International Missions is Dec. 3-10. One hundred percent of gifts given to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering support missionary presence around the world.
For more information on the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, click here.