John Broadus, one of the founders of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, led the revival meeting in 1858 where Moon experienced this awakening.

[citation needed] Although educated females in the mid-19th century generally had few career opportunities, her older sister Orianna became a physician and served as a Confederate Army doctor during the American Civil War.

[citation needed] To the family's surprise, Lottie's younger sister Edmonia accepted a call to go to north China as the first single woman Baptist missionary in 1872.

[3] By this time, the Southern Baptist Convention had relaxed its policy against sending single women into the mission field, and Lottie soon felt called to follow her sister to China.

[citation needed] Lottie joined her sister Edmonia at the North China Mission Station in the treaty port of Dengzhou, in Shandong, (see Penglai, Prefecture City Yantai) and began her ministry by teaching in a boys school.

While accompanying some of the seasoned missionary wives on "country visits" to outlying villages, Moon discovered her passion: direct evangelism.

[4]Moon waged a slow but relentless campaign to give women missionaries the freedom to minister and have an equal voice in mission proceedings.

She encouraged Southern Baptist women to organize mission societies in the local churches to help support additional missionary candidates, and to consider coming themselves.

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894), the Boxer Rebellion (1900) and the Chinese Nationalist uprising (which overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1911) all profoundly affected mission work.

Unknown to her fellow missionaries, Moon shared her personal finances and food with anyone in need around her, severely affecting both her physical and mental health.

[6] Rumors characterize Moon's relationship with Crawford Howell Toy, a former teacher who became a controversial figure among Southern Baptists in the late 19th century, as romantic.

Lottie—who previously learned Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish and would become one of the first women to earn a master's degree in languages—studied Hebrew and English grammar under Toy's tutelage.

In the interim, Toy supported the Confederacy and became a professor of Old Testament studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, while Moon aided her mother on their Virginia estate.

Moon's 1881 correspondence with FMB secretary H. A. Tupper, mentions her plans for a spring wedding with Toy, who was by then teaching Old Testament and religion at Harvard University.

Toy's controversial new beliefs regarding the Bible, as well as Moon's commitment to remain in China doing mission work for Southern Baptists seem involved.