John G. Lake (1870—1935)
Country of Origin
-
Canada
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- Canada
- United States
- South Africa
Traditions
- Pentecostal
- Holiness
Ministries
- healing evangelist
- missionary
John Graham Lake did not set out in life to become a missionary with a healing ministry. His early years in Canada were beset by one family illness after another. “Our church had diligently taught us that the days of miracles were past,” he wrote many years later. “Believing thus, eight members of the family had been permitted to die.”
But new light came flooding into John G. Lake’s heart when his brother, two sisters, and wife, Jennie, were dramatically healed from major afflictions (kidney failure, breast cancer, nonstop hemorrhaging, and tuberculosis). They each experienced healing through the message and prayers at Zion City, Illinois, founded by the controversial John Alexander Dowie. Over the next eight years, Lake testified that “every answer to prayer, every miraculous touch of God, every response of my own soul to the Spirit had created within me a more intense longing for an intimacy and a consciousness of God, like I felt the disciples of Jesus and the primitive church had possessed.”
In 1907, Lake left his business career in the insurance field to preach. What financial assets he had, he gave away.to be "wholly dependent upon God" for the support of himself and his family. As if this was not radical enough, he soon felt the Lord tell him distinctly, “In the spring, you will go to Africa.” How would this be possible, now that he no longer had any savings? He and his preaching colleague, Thomas Hezmalhalch, began to pray. Mysteriously, an envelope with four $500 checks came in the mail one day. They bought tickets and set sail in April 1908 as a group: the Lakes with their seven children, Mr. and Mrs. Hezmalhalch, and two other workers.
“We were faith missionaries,” John G. Lake recalled. “We had neither a board nor friends behind us to furnish money. We were dependent on God. Many times during that trip to Johannesburg we bowed our heads and reminded God that when we arrived there, we should need a home.” As they got off the train, a small woman rushed up to them and asked if they were an American missionary party? They replied that they were. She then asked how many were in the Lake's family, to which John and Jennie replied themselves and their seven children. “Oh, you are the family!” the woman instantly answered. “The Lord has sent me to meet you, and I want to give you a home.” Within hours they were settled in a furnished cottage.
The two men first preached in a rented hall in the suburb of Doornfontein. People immediately began to be affected. One night, a man of desperately bad character, a spiritualist, came under conviction of sin and found his way into the hall. Soon he heard an audible voice telling him, “Go and ask Lake to pray for you.” Lake and Hezmelhalch placed their hands on him, and in a minute he was saved, filled with the Holy Spirit, and praising God in new tongues.
Among others who had entered the hall was the governess of Johannesburg’s chief Jewish rabbi. She was amazed to hear the ex-spiritualist extolling the Lord in pure Hebrew. Her report continues:
His brother, a [railroad] stationmaster, was believed to be a man of irreproachable character; and he too became hungry. However, though he prayed and pleaded with God for blessing, nothing happened. He became desperate….
At last, in a meeting which lasted until four in the morning, the stationmaster withdrew from his pockets a watch and handful of money, placing these on one side, and within a few minutes he was filled with the Holy Spirit. Those present recognized the German language. Afterwards it transpired that the money he had set aside was some of which he had taken from [blacks], by charging them more than was just for their tickets, while the watch had fallen out of somebody’s suitcase; and instead of returning it, he had kept it. Since the stolen property could not be returned to its owners, it was handed to the evangelists for their work.
Provision of funds, however, was the exception rather than the rule. The crowds that came to receive ministry generally assumed that the Americans had a supporting mission society back home, which was not true. More than once the Lake family went without meals. The power of God in public meetings was amazing, but in the shadows, desperation grew.
Three days before Christmas that year, Jennie Lake tragically succumbed while still in her late thirties, apparently exhausted and malnourished. Her husband was devastated. Should he quit and go back to America? He prayed for guidance, and when his sister, Irene, came to help care for the children, he was able to gradually resume his preaching.
Thousands of South Africans were changed, from all races. Miners, farm workers, urban dwellers, and youth filled the meetings. Many churches that sprang up out of these revivals formed a new collecctive, the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa, which today is the nation’s fifth largest religious body.
In early 1913, after five years, the 43-year-old Lake turned leadership over to a young black preacher named Elias Letwaba, who had once been scorned by a white congregation when Lake introduced him. Lake put his arm around the black man’s neck and kissed him, calling him “my brother”—which brought hisses and boos from the crowd. Lake turned suddenly to scold them: “My friends, God has made of one blood all nations of men! If you don’t want to acknowledge them as your brothers, then you’ll have the mortification of going away into eternal woe, while you see many of these black folk going to eternal bliss.” The crowd persisted in their shouting and defamation. Lake, with his hand still on Letwaba’s shoulder, replied, “If you turn out these men, then you must turn me out, too, for I will stand by my black brethren.”
After returning to the United States with his family, Lake traveled to various cities to preach. In November 1913, he married Florence Switzer. By the following July, the couple settled in Spokane, Washington, where Lake pastored a church and opened his first “divine healing rooms”—quiet places where teams of believers would take weekday appointments with the sick, read Scripture to them, and lay hands on them for recovery. Records were kept, documenting that 10,000 people experienced healing in the first sixteen months the rooms were open.
The city was so stirred that the Better Business Bureau appointed a committee to investigate the many stories appearing in local newspapers. When Lake stood before the committee, he brought eighteen individuals who told how they had been healed. He presented the committee with other names to interview and invited them to a public meeting at the Masonic Temple on Sunday, June 23, where 100 different cases would be showcased. The committee started interviewing and sent Lake a letter by by Friday, June 21, saying that the Sunday meeting would not be necessary after all. Two members came to see Lake privately, saying, “We soon found out upon investigation, you did not tell half of it.”
In 1920 the Lakes moved from Spokane to Portland, Oregon, where history repeated itself. Gordon Lindsay (eventual publisher of the Voice of Healing magazine in the 1950s and beyond) remembers going to the Portland church as a boy and seeing “a certain corner reserved for … crutches, casts, and various other paraphernalia which had been discarded by people who once had serious disabilities. It became evident to us that God’s power was mightily in evidence in this assembly, or else there was being perpetrated one of the greatest hoaxes the city of Portland had ever witnessed.”
Lake invested his sunset years in opening healing rooms along the West Coast. This format continues to this day, nearly a century later, based either inside of church buildings or in commercial spaces that look and function much like medical clinics. At Lake's memorial service, the speaker said, “He has left his mark indelibly upon the world of gospel truth…. He found us in sickness. He found us in poverty of spirit. He found us in despair, but he revealed to us such a Christ as we had never dreamed of knowing this side of heaven.”
Further Reading
- John G. Lake, John G. Lake : The Complete Collection of His Life Teachings. Roberts Liardon, ed. (Tulsa, OK: Albury Publishers), 1999.
- John G. Lake, The John G. Lake Sermons on Dominion over Demons, Disease and Death. 5th ed. Gordon Lindsay, ed. (Dallas, Texas: Voice of Healing), 1949.
- John G. Lake John G. Lake’s Writings from Africa : Includes Previously Unpublished Writings. Curry R. Blake, ed. (Xulon Press), 2005.