Jonathan Goforth

Jonathan Goforth grew up on an Ontario farm, was converted as a teenager, and sailed for China in 1888 with his wife Rosalind. They buried five of their eleven children on the field. In 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion, a mob attacked their party; Goforth took sword wounds to the head and neck, and the family fled a thousand miles to the coast. Afterward he read everything he could find about the Welsh revival, and when he preached in Manchuria in 1908 the meetings broke open in a way he had never engineered and could not stop: men stood in packed churches and confessed theft, adultery, and hatred out loud, then went and made it right. He spent his last decades opening new work in Shandong and beyond, went blind in his seventies, and kept preaching anyway, dictating from memory. He died in his sleep in Toronto in 1936, the night after preaching again.