Due to his wife Eliza's failing health, Otis Gibson left China with her in 1865 and returned to Moira as a pastor.
In 1868 he was assigned to San Francisco, California as superintendent of the Methodist Church's "Chinese Domestic Mission" designed to minister to the swelling number of Chinese immigrants in area of the California Conference.
There he learned the Cantonese dialect and opened many missions and churches, including San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, Salinas, and in the gold fields in the foothills of California, and he also wrote a Chinese-English Dictionary and translated the New Testament into Cantonese.
Gibson and his wife had instituted on August 10, 1870 the Women's Missionary Society of the Pacific Coast, enlisting area Methodist women to organize the rescue and protection of exploited Chinese women of the slave trade.
In October 1871, Gibson baptized his first convert in America, a young Chinese prostitute named Jin Ho.

In his later life, Otis Gibson made untiring and courageous efforts in behalf of the poor and the wronged of the Chinese on the Pacific Coast.
In his landmark work The Chinese in America (唐人在金山, ISBN 0-405-11272-6) which was published in 1877, Gibson concluded his polemic against the anti-Chinese arguments with a noble restatement of the American ideal:
The doors of our country are open equally... We have room for all.
Ours is the "land of the free, and the home of the brave."
The oppressed and down-trodden from all nations may alike find shelter here, and under the benign influences of our free institutions, and of our exalted faith, with the blessing of Almighty God, these different nationalities and varying civilizations shall, in time, blend into one harmonious whole, illustrating to a wondering world the common Fatherhood of God, and the universal brotherhood of man.

Otis Gibson was strongly anti-Catholic.

While attending a preachers meeting in 1884 Gibson was stricken with paralysis.
He died in San Francisco after a long illness on January 25, 1889, at the home of his son.
Due to his wife Eliza's failing health, Otis Gibson left China with her in 1865 and returned to Moira as a pastor. In 1868 he was assigned to San Francisco, California as superintendent of the Methodist Church's "Chinese Domestic Mission" designed to minister to the swelling number of Chinese immigrants in area of the California Conference. There he learned the Cantonese dialect and opened many missions and churches, including San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, Salinas, and in the gold fields in the foothills of California, and he also wrote a Chinese-English Dictionary and translated the New Testament into Cantonese. Gibson and his wife had instituted on August 10, 1870 the Women's Missionary Society of the Pacific Coast, enlisting area Methodist women to organize the rescue and protection of exploited Chinese women of the slave trade. In October 1871, Gibson baptized his first convert in America, a young Chinese prostitute named Jin Ho.
In his later life, Otis Gibson made untiring and courageous efforts in behalf of the poor and the wronged of the Chinese on the Pacific Coast. In his landmark work The Chinese in America (唐人在金山, ISBN 0-405-11272-6) which was published in 1877, Gibson concluded his polemic against the anti-Chinese arguments with a noble restatement of the American ideal:
The doors of our country are open equally... We have room for all. Ours is the "land of the free, and the home of the brave." The oppressed and down-trodden from all nations may alike find shelter here, and under the benign influences of our free institutions, and of our exalted faith, with the blessing of Almighty God, these different nationalities and varying civilizations shall, in time, blend into one harmonious whole, illustrating to a wondering world the common Fatherhood of God, and the universal brotherhood of man.
Otis Gibson was strongly anti-Catholic.
While attending a preachers meeting in 1884 Gibson was stricken with paralysis. He died in San Francisco after a long illness on January 25, 1889, at the home of his son.
Otis Gibson