
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 10, 1990                   TAG: 9003102568
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: FRANCES STEBBINS CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CONFERENCE OPENS ON WOMEN IN CLERGY

The pioneer Southern Baptist missionary Lottie Moon, born in Virginia 150 years ago, was a remarkable model for women in professional ministry today, about 270 people heard Friday night.

At Hollins College, where Moon was a prep school student before the Civil War, the missionary's birth sesquicentennial is being celebrated this weekend. A conference on women in ministry, two years in the planning, has 38 registered.

Speaking in DuPont Chapel, Moon's most recent biographer, Catherine Allen, said the early professional female minister cast shadows that have affected church women to this day.

Moon founded one of the world's largest church groups, the Southern Baptist Woman's Missionary Union and was an early feminist and original thinker. At Hollins, her biographer recalled in a 50-minute address, Moon was a mischievous teen and a skeptic about her family's Baptist faith.

That changed in her young adulthood during the devastation the Civil War brought to her prominent family's fortunes. Converted at a Charlottesville revival meeting, Moon became first a teacher and later one of the first single women to enter foreign mission work.

She served in China from 1873 until 1912, at one time single-handedly running a mission in an unprotected part of the country. As an old and discouraged woman in a time of Chinese political unrest, Moon sacrificed her life to help the starving in a famine.

Allen, in her lecture and 1980 book, "The New Lottie Moon Story,"said Moon saw women in ministry as fully equal to men, although 100 years ago Southern Baptist men usually insulted their abilities.

Moon is remembered annually by Baptists and others with a Christmas season offering for foreign missions. Over 100 years nearly $1 billion has been given to missions in this offering, Allen said.

At Hollins, which had strong Baptist ties when Moon went there, 28 women have been ordained to ministry, former chaplain Alvord Beardslee said. The present chaplain and one of these alumnae, the Rev. Jan Fuller Carruthers, said 10 of these are participating in the conference which continues through Sunday.

by CNB