Annie Armstrong | She Spoke

July 11, 1850: a wealthy Baltimore family welcomes a daughter who will grow up to refuse every salary she's ever offered and write over 77,000 letters on behalf of missionaries she'd mostly never meet. On today's Moments Almanac, we mark the birthday of Annie Armstrong — the strong-willed, unpaid, occasionally infuriating laywoman behind the Woman's Missionary Union and the Easter offering that still bears her name. This one isn't a hero story. It's an honest one — and it might be better for it.

Transcript

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Welcome to Moments Almanac in the second issue today. And today is special because it's the birthday of a very special lady. Baltimore, July 11th, 1850. A daughter is born into wealth and comfort, into a family with deep Baptist roots, stretching back generations. No one watching that day could have guessed she would spend her adult life refusing every dollar of salary anyone offered her. She didn't come to faith early or easily. Not until she was on the edge of 20 did she surrender to Christ under the preaching of Richard Fuller at 7th Baptist Church in Baltimore. She helped plant a new congregation, Utah Place Baptist Church, and there she stayed for 70 years, teaching the same infant Sunday school class for three decades. In the year 1888, she helped found the Woman's Missionary Union. And for 18 years she ran it without taking a paycheck. She wrote letters and almost unbelievable number of them. By one count, over 77,000 in a single decade. More than 8,000 a year, handwritten appeals to churches that had never once thought about the missionary two states or two oceans away. Every one of those letters was a translation. She was carrying a story from a mission field no one in the Pew had seen and putting it into words a Baptist congregation and say Georgia or Texas could not ignore. She didn't stop at the mission field overseas. In Baltimore, she started the Bayview mission to reach the addicted and the poor in her own city. She pushed her denomination, often against real resistance, to organize missions among African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants at a time when plenty of Southern Baptists would rather she hadn't. Here's where the story gets honest and maybe a little untidy. Annie Armstrong was famously strong-willed, and that didn't serve her well sometimes. In 1906, she resigned, and it was not a quiet, hushed retirement. She opposed folding the WMU's training school into a men's seminary in Louisville, convinced it would drain money and attention away from the actual work of missions. She also refused to accept the WMU's new requirement that the corresponding secretary be paid a salary. When the vote went against her on both counts, she walked away from the organization she had built. Grace does not require a smooth ending to be real. Paul asked the Roman Church a question that fits Annie Armstrong better than almost any in Baptist history. How shall they hear without a preacher? And how beautiful, he said, are the feet of those who carry good news. Annie Armstrong never had a pulpit. No. She never had a title the convention fully trusted a woman to hold. She carried other people's gospel stories on her own two feet, and in her own handwriting, letter after letter for decades, for free. To churches that would have never heard otherwise. In nineteen thirty four, four years before she died, the Southern Baptist Convention named its Easter offering for home missions after her. Since then it has raised billions of dollars for the very work that she had spent her entire life laboring in. She was not a saint carved in marble. No, she was difficult, tireless. She was a sacrificial woman who could not stop believing that somebody needed to carry the message and that it might as well be her. So happy birthday, Annie Armstrong, Baltimore, July 11th, 1850. Thanks for listening to this special episode of Moments Almanac. I hope you'll join me tomorrow. Until then, take care. Notice the scatter moments and share the grace.