John G. Lake

John Graham Lake grew up in a family that buried eight of its sixteen children, and the funerals made him hungry for a God who heals. He was doing well in insurance in Chicago when he walked away from it in 1907, and in 1908 he sailed for South Africa with his wife Jennie and their seven children, arriving with almost nothing. The work he helped begin there became the Apostolic Faith Mission, and the churches that grew out of it are among the largest in southern Africa today. Jennie died within months of their arrival, worn out. Back in the United States, Lake opened healing rooms in Spokane, Washington, where teams prayed for the sick daily for six years; he claimed tens of thousands of healings, and his own accounts of immunity to bubonic plague during a South African outbreak rest on his testimony alone. He died in 1935 in Spokane, still praying for the sick.