The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Revival Streams
Jonathan Goforth
1859–1936CanadianPresbyterian missionary
An Ontario farm boy who survived the Boxer Rebellion and then saw revival break out across Manchuria.
Summary
- Lived 1859–1936, Canadian.
- Stood in The Revival Streams (1900–1950).
- Hangs on The Revivalists and The Missionaries.
- Tradition: Presbyterian missionary.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived14 moments · 1900–1950
- Feb 1904A girl stands up in New Quay, WalesAt a young people's meeting on the Welsh coast, Florrie Evans stood and said simply that she loved the Lord Jesus with all her heart. The room broke, and the meetings that followed spread up the coast months before Evan Roberts began.
- Nov 1904 – 1905The Welsh valleys burnThe Western Mail sent reporters to follow the meetings nightly, and the story went round the world by cable. About a hundred thousand converts within the year is the figure the press and the churches gave at the time, widely repeated since, but never audited.
- 1905The social effects the newspapers recordedPapers reported taverns closing for want of custom, old debts repaid, and magistrates handed white gloves for court sessions with no cases to try. The best-loved story, that the pit ponies balked because the miners had stopped swearing at them, is the era's own testimony and hard to document.
- Jun 1905Mukti Mission, India, revival among the rescuedAt Pandita Ramabai's mission at Kedgaon, where hundreds of famine widows and orphan girls were being sheltered and taught, prayer meetings turned into weeping, confession, and reported tongues. Ramabai had asked her girls to pray for revival after reading the reports from Wales.
- Apr 1906312 Azusa StreetThey moved into an abandoned livery stable with sawdust on the floor and planks laid across nail kegs for pews. Meetings ran nearly around the clock for three years, with no set order, no name on the door, and no one taking up an offering by force.
- Sep 1906The Apostolic Faith goes out freeThe mission began printing its own paper and mailing it to anyone who asked, at no charge. It claimed a subscription list in the tens of thousands and reported healings, tongues, and conversions in nearly every issue, the mission's own testimony about itself, and read best that way.
- Jan 1907Pyongyang, the Korean PentecostAt New Year Bible study meetings in Korea, missionary confession of coldness opened a flood of public confession among the Korean believers: theft, hatred, adultery named out loud. Restitution followed, and the daybreak prayer meeting born there still marks Korean churches worldwide.
- 1906–1909Workers scatter from AzusaPeople came, received, and went home, to more than twenty-five nations within about two years, by the mission's own count. Parham himself came in late 1906, denounced what he saw, and was turned away; the mission's leadership and its mailing list fractured soon after.
- Apr 1914The streams organize: Assemblies of GodMinisters met at Hot Springs, Arkansas, to form a fellowship for order, missions, and credentials. The new bodies mostly formed along the color line that Azusa had crossed, and the American Pentecostal movement stayed largely segregated for eighty years.
- 1915–1920Rees Howells in southern AfricaA Welsh miner converted in America and shaped by the 1904 revival went out to the Rusitu valley as a missionary. He prayed for the same thing he had seen at home, and by his and his colleagues' accounts revival came to the mission stations and spread through the district.
- 1924The Bible College of Wales opens at SwanseaHowells bought an estate he could not afford and opened a college where students were taught to pray as work. Its ledger of answered prayer, kept in his own hand, is the reason his biography exists.
- Apr 1929Sadhu Sundar Singh walks toward TibetThe Indian sadhu who had preached Christ barefoot across the Himalayas for twenty years set out again for Tibet in poor health and was never seen again. No body was ever found, and no account of his end exists.
- 1936Wigglesworth's word to David du PlessisAs du Plessis told it for the rest of his life, the old Bradford plumber-evangelist pinned him to a wall in Johannesburg and told him a move of the Spirit would come to the historic churches, and that he would have a part in it. We have the story only from du Plessis, who lived to see something like it.
- 1939–1945The college prays through the warHowells and his students at Swansea gave themselves to intercession through Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the years that followed, keeping records of what they prayed and when. What that prayer accomplished is God's ledger, not history's, and the college never claimed otherwise.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Jonathan Goforth at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Took sword wounds from a Boxer mob, then watched Manchuria break open in public confession he had not planned and could not stop.
Hangs on The Revivalists: The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed. Hangs on The Missionaries: The ones who looked at a map and could not stay home.
Standing beside himThe Revival Streams · 17 on this stretch of wall
A plumber who could barely read, whose wife taught him the Bible and whose prayers for the sick filled halls across the world.
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Learned Pentecost from a hallway because the law would not seat him in the room, then led a revival where the color line came down.
Died at forty-three in an Egyptian army camp; his wife's shorthand of his talks became the daily book millions still read.
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Prayed for years that God would bend Wales, saw a revival credited at the time with about a hundred thousand converts (a contemporary estimate, not an audit), then vanished into hidden prayer for the rest of his life.
Burned a Bible at fourteen, saw Christ three days later, and walked the Himalayas in a saffron robe until the mountains kept him.
Widowed on the mission field at twenty, she came home and built a temple, a radio station, and a soup line that fed Los Angeles through the Depression.