The healing movement, 1870s-1910s

Affiliation

Canadian Presbyterian minister; founder of the Gospel Tabernacle, New York, and of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (1887/1897)

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The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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Life

A Presbyterian boyhood

Albert Benjamin Simpson was born on 15 December 1843 at Bayview, Prince Edward Island, Canada, to a Scottish Presbyterian family of farmers and shipbuilders, and grew up in Chatham, Ontario. His upbringing was strict and Calvinist; as a teenager he went through a long period of fear about his salvation, resolved by reading Walter Marshall's The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification. He studied at Knox College, Toronto, graduating in 1865, and was ordained the same year.

A rising pastor

At twenty-one he became minister of Knox Church, Hamilton, Ontario, one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in Canada. He married Margaret Henry in 1865. In 1873 he moved to the Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, where he led city-wide evangelistic meetings after the Civil War, and in 1879 to the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church in New York City. Throughout these years he suffered from nervous exhaustion and heart trouble; he wrote later that he was "a nervous wreck" and had been told by a doctor that he would not live long.

Sanctification and healing

In Louisville, reading W.E. Boardman's The Higher Christian Life, he sought and claimed a deeper experience of Christ as his sanctification. In 1881, at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, he attended a meeting of the healing evangelist Charles Cullis and became convinced that healing is part of the gospel. Walking in the woods afterwards, he committed himself to accept Christ as his physician; he wrote that his heart trouble disappeared and that he was able afterwards to climb a 3,000-foot mountain. He lived another thirty-eight years of exceptionally hard work.

The Gospel Tabernacle

The same year he concluded that infant baptism was unscriptural and was immersed. He resigned from the Presbyterian ministry in November 1881 to work among the unchurched poor of New York, and founded an independent congregation that became the Gospel Tabernacle. He opened Berachah Home for the sick (1883), began a missionary training college (1883, later Nyack College), and published The Word, Work and World, later The Alliance Weekly.

The Alliance

In 1887, at Old Orchard Beach, he founded two societies: the Christian Alliance, for believers in many churches who held the Fourfold Gospel, and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance, for overseas missions. They merged in 1897 as the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). Simpson insisted it was a fellowship and missionary society, not a denomination. By his death it had missionaries in some sixteen countries.

Pentecostalism

When the Pentecostal revival reached the Alliance in 1906-07, especially at Nyack and in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Simpson investigated it with sympathy. His private diary shows that he sought the gift of tongues for himself without receiving it. He concluded that tongues might be a genuine gift but must not be made the evidence of the baptism in the Spirit. His policy became known as "seek not, forbid not". Several leaders and congregations left for the new Assemblies of God.

Key dates

• 1843 - Born at Bayview, Prince Edward Island, 15 December
• 1865 - Graduates from Knox College, Toronto; minister of Knox Church, Hamilton
• 1873 - Minister in Louisville, Kentucky
• 1879 - Minister in New York
• 1881 - Healed at Old Orchard Beach; immersed; leaves the Presbyterian ministry
• 1882-83 - Gospel Tabernacle; Berachah Home; missionary training college
• 1887 - Founds the Christian Alliance and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance
• 1890 - The Four-fold Gospel
• 1897 - The two societies merge as the Christian and Missionary Alliance
• 1906-12 - Pentecostal revival and division in the Alliance
• 1918 - Suffers a stroke
• 29 October 1919 - Dies at Nyack, New York

Teachings and claims

The Fourfold Gospel

Simpson summed up his message as Christ our Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King. The emblem of the C&MA - a cross, a laver, a pitcher of oil and a crown - pictures the four.

Sanctification as union with Christ

He taught a crisis experience of sanctification after conversion, but understood it less as the removal of sin (as in the Wesleyan Holiness movement) than as the indwelling of Christ - "not the blessing but the Blesser" - received by surrender and faith, in the Keswick tradition.

Healing in the atonement

From Isaiah 53:4-5 and Matthew 8:17 he taught that Christ bore our sicknesses as well as our sins, so that bodily healing is provided in the atonement and may be claimed by faith. He did not forbid medicine outright, but he discouraged reliance on it and believed that a Christian fully trusting God would not need it. He taught that healing is a foretaste of the resurrection, not immunity from death.

Missions and the return of Christ

He believed that taking the gospel to every nation would hasten Christ's return (Matthew 24:14), and made world mission the centre of the Alliance.

Documented controversies

• Leaving the Presbyterian Church. His adoption of believer's immersion and divine healing, and his departure from his New York church in 1881, were criticised by fellow Presbyterians.
• Healing and medicine. Critics, including the Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield in Counterfeit Miracles (1918), attacked the faith-cure movement, of which Simpson was a leader. Deaths among those who refused medical care in faith-healing circles were widely reported, though Simpson was more moderate than Dowie.
• The Pentecostal division. The Alliance lost many members and workers to the Pentecostal movement after 1907; some Pentecostals accused Simpson of resisting the Spirit, while some Alliance members thought him too open.

He was personally modest, and no significant personal scandal is recorded.

Death

Simpson suffered a stroke in 1918 and died at his home in Nyack, New York, on 29 October 1919, aged 75. He was buried on the Nyack College campus.

Legacy

The Christian and Missionary Alliance became a worldwide missionary denomination, with several million members, the large majority outside North America. Nyack College (now Alliance University) and many other schools descend from his work.

He wrote more than seventy books and some 120 hymns. Through members who left for Pentecostalism - including leaders of the early Assemblies of God - his Fourfold Gospel shaped Pentecostal theology: Aimee Semple McPherson's "Foursquare Gospel" is a close adaptation.

Measured against the creeds

Simpson's devotion to Christ, his care for the poor and his missionary vision are admirable, and his "seek not, forbid not" was more cautious than many in his day. His teaching that healing is provided in the atonement in the same way as forgiveness, however, goes beyond what the Church has taught. The Church prays for the sick and anoints them, and believes God heals; but it has held that bodily healing in this age is a gift, not a guaranteed benefit of the cross like the forgiveness of sins, and that all will suffer and die until the resurrection (Romans 8:23). St Paul's own "thorn in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7-9) and Timothy's stomach (1 Timothy 5:23) show this.

His separation of sanctification as a second crisis, and his rejection of infant baptism, also depart from the historic faith, which places the gift of the Spirit and new life in baptism and holds sanctification to be a lifelong growth.

Major writings

• The Gospel of Healing (1885)
• The Four-fold Gospel (1890)
• The Holy Spirit, or Power from on High, 2 vols (1895-96)
• Wholly Sanctified (1890)
• Christ in the Bible (commentary series)
• Hymns including "Himself" and "Yesterday, Today, Forever"

Affiliation

Church of God (Winebrenner) evangelist until 1904; independent Holiness, then Pentecostal evangelist; founder of a tabernacle in Indianapolis (1918)

Appears in

The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Pentecostal celebrity evangelists, 1910s-1940s

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Life

Ohio childhood

Mariah Beulah Underwood was born on 22 July 1844 near New Lisbon, Columbiana County, Ohio, one of eight children of a farming family. Her father, a heavy drinker, died of sunstroke in 1857, leaving the family poor, and she went to work as a girl. At thirteen she was converted and baptised among the Disciples of Christ, the church of Alexander Campbell, and she said she felt even then a call to preach - a call she believed closed to her as a woman, since the Disciples did not permit women in the pulpit.

Marriage and loss

In 1863 she married Philo Harrison Woodworth, a farmer recently discharged from the Union army after a head injury. The marriage was unhappy and the farm failed. Of their six children, five died young, most of them of disease. Maria later wrote that these losses, and her own long illnesses, were God's way of breaking her resistance to her call. She read Scripture for herself and concluded that women were called to preach as surely as men, pointing to Joel 2:28 and to the women prophets of the Old and New Testaments.

The trance evangelist

She began to preach around 1879-80, first among the Friends (Quakers) and then the United Brethren, and from 1884 held a licence from the Churches of God (General Conference), the body founded by John Winebrenner. Her revival meetings in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois drew thousands. What made them famous was the "trance": men and women fell to the ground and lay rigid, sometimes for hours, before rising to describe visions of heaven or hell. She herself sometimes stood motionless on the platform for long periods. Newspapers called her the "trance evangelist" and "the voodoo priestess", and journalists and physicians argued about whether the phenomena were hysteria, hypnotism or something else. In 1885 meetings at Hartford City and Kokomo, Indiana, were among her largest.

From the mid-1880s she prayed for the sick, and healing became a major part of her work. Her meetings in St Louis in 1890 provoked a campaign by local physicians, who tried to have her declared insane.^†

Oakland, 1889-90

In late 1889 she began a long tent campaign in Oakland, California. During it a prophecy circulated among her followers that San Francisco, Oakland and Alameda would be destroyed by earthquake and tidal wave on 14 April 1890. Many people left the area; the date passed without incident. The press ridiculed her, and the campaign ended in disarray. Her biographer Wayne Warner treats the prophecy as hers and as false; some defenders say it came from followers rather than from her. She later linked it to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

She divorced Philo Woodworth in 1891, charging adultery; he died the following year. In 1902 she married Samuel Etter, a farmer from Arkansas, who supported her ministry until his death in 1914. The Churches of God withdrew her licence in 1904.

The elder of Pentecost

When the Pentecostal revival broke out in 1906, she was over sixty. In 1912 F.F. Bosworth invited her to Dallas, where a campaign of about five months drew crowds of thousands and attracted many of the young leaders of the new movement. She now identified herself fully with Pentecostalism, and its people honoured her as a pioneer whose ministry had anticipated theirs. In 1913 she was the principal speaker at the Worldwide Camp Meeting at Arroyo Seco, near Los Angeles, the meeting at which the "Jesus' name" (Oneness) baptism controversy first surfaced; she did not adopt the Oneness teaching. The same year she was arrested at Framingham, Massachusetts, on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences in connection with healing; the case did not end in a conviction.^†

In 1918 she settled in Indianapolis, where she built a tabernacle in the west of the city and preached there until her death.

Key dates

• 22 July 1844 - Born near New Lisbon, Ohio
• c. 1857 - Converted and baptised among the Disciples of Christ
• 1863 - Marries P.H. Woodworth; five of six children later die young
• c. 1880 - Begins to preach
• 1884 - Licensed by the Churches of God (Winebrenner)
• 1885 - Great meetings at Hartford City and Kokomo, Indiana
• 1889-90 - Oakland campaign; the failed earthquake prophecy of 14 April 1890
• 1891 - Divorces Woodworth
• 1902 - Marries Samuel Etter
• 1904 - Licence withdrawn by the Churches of God
• 1912 - Dallas campaign with F.F. Bosworth
• 1913 - Arroyo Seco camp meeting; arrested at Framingham
• 1916 - Publishes Signs and Wonders
• 1918 - Opens her tabernacle in Indianapolis
• 16 September 1924 - Dies in Indianapolis

Teachings and claims

Repentance and the coming Christ

Her preaching was in the revivalist tradition: sin, judgement, repentance and holiness, with an urgent expectation of Christ's return. She taught that the gifts of the Spirit, lost through the Church's unfaithfulness, were being restored before the end.

Healing

She taught that God heals in answer to prayer and faith, and anointed and laid hands on the sick. She did not reject physicians as firmly as John Alexander Dowie did, but she encouraged reliance on God alone.

Trances and visions

She regarded the trances as the power of God falling on people, and the visions reported in them as revelations, often of heaven, hell or the coming judgement. They became the most frequently cited precedent for the later Pentecostal and charismatic practice of being "slain in the Spirit".

Women preaching

Her defence of women's preaching from Joel 2 and Acts 2 was one of the earliest popular statements of the position in American revivalism, and she lived it out for forty-five years.

Documented controversies

The 1890 prophecy

The earthquake prediction is the best-documented failed prophecy of her career. Warner records that she never admitted that it was wrong.

The trances

Contemporary physicians, journalists and some clergy regarded the trances as hysterical or hypnotic. Her defenders pointed to conversions and changed lives. The debate is one of the earliest public disputes over the bodily phenomena of revival.

Arrests and lawsuits

Besides the St Louis insanity petition and the Framingham arrest, she was the subject of several legal complaints in the course of her ministry. None ended in a conviction.

Divorce

Her divorce in 1891, at a time when many churches regarded divorce as disqualifying a minister, was criticised; she defended it on the ground of her husband's adultery.

Death

She died at her home in Indianapolis on 16 September 1924, aged 80. She is buried in Memorial Park Cemetery in Indianapolis.^†

Legacy

Pentecostals regard her as a bridge between the Holiness healing revivals of the nineteenth century and the Pentecostal movement, and as a pioneer of women's ministry. Her tabernacle continues as Lakeview Church in Indianapolis. The bodily phenomena of her meetings became a pattern that Kathryn Kuhlman and later healing evangelists followed, and her name is still invoked whenever "slain in the Spirit" is defended as historic. Her books of sermons and testimonies remain in print in charismatic publishing.

Measured against the creeds

Woodworth-Etter's preaching of repentance, faith and Christ's return stood within the common faith, and she held to the Trinity and to the deity of Christ. Her care for the sick and her courage in a hostile press are not in question.

The difficulties lie elsewhere. The historic churches have never treated bodily phenomena - falling, trances, rigidity - as a sign of the Spirit's work; the Spirit's fruit is "love, joy, peace" (Galatians 5:22), and Paul's rule for public worship is that "God is not the author of confusion" (1 Corinthians 14:33). Visions received in trance are not a source of doctrine and must be tested by Scripture and the Church's faith (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21; 1 John 4:1). A prophecy that fails, by the biblical test, was not spoken by the Lord (Deuteronomy 18:22), and the refusal to acknowledge it is a more serious matter than the error itself.

On women's preaching, the four traditions differ among themselves today, and their own practice has changed; but none of them accepts the principle, implicit in her ministry and in much revivalism since, that a personal sense of call is enough to authorise a public ministry without the Church's testing and sending (Romans 10:15; Acts 13:2-3).

Major writings

• Life and Experience of Mrs. M.B. Woodworth (1885)
• Acts of the Holy Ghost (1912)
• Signs and Wonders God Wrought in the Ministry for Forty Years (1916)
• Marvels and Miracles God Wrought in the Ministry for Forty-Five Years (1922)

Affiliation

Congregational minister in Australia; founder of the Christian Catholic Church (1896) and Zion City, Illinois

Appears in

The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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Life

Edinburgh and Adelaide

John Alexander Dowie was born in Edinburgh on 25 May 1847, the son of a tailor and lay preacher. In 1860 the family emigrated to Adelaide, South Australia, where he worked in his uncle's business. In 1867 he returned to Edinburgh to study at the university, attending classes in arts and theology for about two years without taking a degree, and went back to Australia in 1870.

Congregational minister

He was ordained in the Congregational Union and served churches at Alma, near Adelaide, and from 1873 at Newtown, a suburb of Sydney. In 1876, during an epidemic (probably typhoid) in which he buried some forty of his parishioners, he became convinced from Acts 10:38 that sickness is the oppression of the devil and that Christ heals today. He prayed for a dying young woman in his congregation, who recovered, and from then on he taught healing by faith. He married his cousin Jane Dowie in 1876.

He left the Congregational ministry in 1878, criticising its ties to the world, and became an independent evangelist in Sydney and then Melbourne, where he built a Free Christian Tabernacle. He campaigned fiercely against alcohol and in 1885 was jailed for a month in Melbourne for holding unauthorised processions. ^† He founded the International Divine Healing Association in 1886.

America and the Chicago fair

In 1888 he left Australia for San Francisco and travelled the Pacific coast holding healing meetings. In 1890 he settled near Chicago. During the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 he set up a small wooden tabernacle opposite Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and held healing services that drew growing crowds. His magazine Leaves of Healing (from 1894) published testimonies, and he opened "Divine Healing Homes" where the sick could stay while being prayed for.

The Christian Catholic Church and Zion

In February 1896 he founded the Christian Catholic Church (later the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church), declaring himself its General Overseer. In 1899-1900 he secretly bought 6,500 acres on Lake Michigan, forty miles north of Chicago, and on 1 January 1900 announced the founding of Zion City. Lots went on sale in July 1901 on 1,100-year leases that forbade alcohol, tobacco, pork, oysters, theatres, doctors and drugstores. Dowie owned or controlled the land, the bank, the stores and the lace factory. By 1905 Zion had perhaps 7,500 residents.

Elijah and the First Apostle

On 2 June 1901 he declared that he was "Elijah the Restorer", the prophet foretold in Malachi 4 and Matthew 17:11, and appeared thereafter in elaborate robes. In October 1903 he took a party of some 3,000 followers by special trains to New York for a "visitation" at Madison Square Garden; hostile crowds and ridicule ended in a humiliating retreat, and the cost helped push Zion into insolvency. In September 1904 he consecrated himself "First Apostle" of the restored Church.

Collapse

Zion's industries were unprofitable, and the city went into receivership in 1906. Dowie, who had suffered a stroke in September 1905, was in Mexico when, in April 1906^†, his deputy Wilbur Glenn Voliva and the Zion leadership deposed him, accusing him of extravagance, misuse of funds and teaching polygamy. Dowie challenged the deposition in court, but the court gave the church's property to a receiver and an election confirmed Voliva.

Key dates

• 1847 - Born in Edinburgh, 25 May
• 1860 - Family emigrates to Adelaide
• 1867-69 - Studies at the University of Edinburgh
• 1876 - Embraces divine healing during a Sydney epidemic
• 1878 - Leaves the Congregational ministry
• 1888 - Moves to the United States
• 1893 - Healing services at the Chicago World's Fair
• 1894 - Leaves of Healing begins
• 1895 - Prosecuted in Chicago for practising medicine without a licence
• 1896 - Founds the Christian Catholic Church
• 1900-01 - Founds Zion City
• 2 June 1901 - Declares himself "Elijah the Restorer"
• 1903 - New York "visitation"
• 1904 - Consecrates himself "First Apostle"
• 1906 - Deposed by Voliva and the Zion leadership
• 9 March 1907 - Dies at Zion

Teachings and claims

Healing without doctors

Dowie taught that sickness, like sin, is the work of the devil, and that Christ's atonement provides healing for the body. To use doctors, drugs or surgery was to trust the arm of flesh; he called medicine "devil's work" and doctors "poisoners". A Christian who was not healed lacked faith or harboured sin.

Zion as the kingdom

He saw Zion City as a restoration of God's rule on earth: a holy city where every part of life, from business to food, was ordered by the law of God under the prophet's authority, and from which the gospel would go out to the world.

Restoration of offices

He held that the Church had lost its apostles and prophets through unbelief and that God was restoring them. His own claims - Elijah, then First Apostle - were the summit of this.

Other teachings

He taught triune immersion as the only valid baptism, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, the dietary laws against pork, and the coming restoration of all things. He denounced Freemasonry, the press and much of organised Christianity.

Documented controversies

• Prosecutions. He was arrested and prosecuted in Chicago in 1895 for practising medicine without a licence and for violations relating to his healing homes; he fought the charges and many were dropped.
• Healings questioned. Chicago newspapers alleged that some healings at his meetings were exaggerated or staged, and printed accounts of patients who died in his homes.
• Deaths without medical care. Deaths of followers, including children, who refused medical treatment drew public criticism and inquests.^†
• Financial control. Residents were urged to deposit their savings in Zion's bank and invest in its businesses, which failed; critics alleged that large sums were unaccounted for and that Dowie lived in luxury.^†
• The New York fiasco (1903) and his escalating claims to be Elijah and an apostle.
• The deposition of 1906, in which his own leaders accused him of extravagance and of advocating polygamy.^†

Death

After his stroke in 1905, Dowie lived on in Zion, partly paralysed and with a few remaining followers, in his house Shiloh. He died there on 9 March 1907, aged 59. He had suffered further strokes and was said to have died still believing in his mission.

Legacy

Zion was the seedbed of early Pentecostalism. When Charles Parham preached there in 1906, many residents embraced tongues, and Zion produced a remarkable number of early Pentecostal and healing leaders - John G. Lake, F.F. Bosworth, Gordon Lindsay's parents, Marie Burgess Brown and others. Missionaries sent by Dowie to South Africa helped found the Apostolic Faith Mission there and the "Zionist" churches, which today number millions across southern Africa. Under Voliva, Zion became famous for teaching that the earth is flat.

Through Lindsay, who wrote his biography, Dowie also became a model for the post-war healing revival.

Measured against the creeds

The historic Church has always prayed for the sick, anointed them (James 5:14-15) and honoured miracles of healing. It has never held that using medicine is a sin; the Fathers and the monastic tradition founded hospitals, and Scripture itself commends the physician (Sirach 38:1-15). Dowie's teaching turned prayer for healing into a law, with deadly results for some who obeyed it, and laid guilt on those who were not healed.

His claims to be Elijah and the First Apostle set his own person above the Church and the apostolic ministry handed down from Christ. The Church holds that Elijah's promised coming was fulfilled in John the Baptist (Matthew 11:14; 17:12-13), and that the foundation of the apostles is laid once for all (Ephesians 2:20). His theocratic city, ruled by a prophet who controlled land, money and conscience, is an example of what happens when such claims go unchecked.

Major writings

• Editor, Leaves of Healing (1894-1906)
• Published sermons and addresses in Leaves of Healing

Affiliation

Resident of Zion City (1901-07); Pentecostal missionary to South Africa (1908-13); co-founder of the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa; founder of healing rooms in Spokane and Portland

Appears in

The healing movement, 1870s-1910s, Topeka and Azusa Street

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Life

A full account of Lake's life has two layers: the story he told, which his admirers have repeated, and what independent records show. Both are given here.

Early life

John Graham Lake was born on 18 March 1870 at St Marys, Ontario, Canada, one of sixteen children; the family moved to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Lake said that several of his siblings died of illness and that he himself was sickly. In the 1890s he married Jennie Stevens and worked in Michigan and Chicago. He later said he had been licensed as a Methodist preacher, had founded newspapers, and had made a fortune in real estate and insurance, holding a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade.

Zion

Lake said that his brother, sisters and wife were healed through the ministry of John Alexander Dowie, and he moved to Zion City in 1901, where he worked as a manager in its building department.^† After Dowie's fall, Parham's preaching in Zion (1906) won many residents to Pentecostalism, and in 1907 Lake received the baptism in the Spirit and spoke in tongues, with Thomas Hezmalhalch praying for him,^† and began to preach and pray for the sick in the Midwest.

South Africa

In April 1908 Lake, his wife, their seven children and several co-workers sailed for South Africa, with no mission board or salary. In Johannesburg they took over a meeting place and held revival meetings that drew Black and white South Africans. With Thomas Hezmalhalch and others, Lake helped organise the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) of South Africa, which took in many of the "Zionist" congregations planted earlier by Dowie's missionaries. Jennie Lake died in December 1908, while he was away preaching; he blamed her death on exhaustion and malnutrition. In 1909 he was elected president of the AFM. He returned to America in 1913, having married Florence Switzer in 1913.

Spokane and Portland

In 1914 Lake settled in Spokane, Washington, where he opened "healing rooms" in the Rookery Building and founded the Apostolic Church. He claimed that some 100,000 healings occurred there between 1915 and 1920 and that the U.S. government had declared Spokane "the healthiest city in the world". In 1920 he moved to Portland, Oregon, and then spent years in Texas and California before returning to Spokane in 1931.

What the records show

In 2012 the historian Barry Morton, working through census records, newspapers and South African archives, concluded that much of this story was invented. Census records list Lake as a carpenter or labourer, not a businessman; no evidence was found for his Board of Trade seat, his newspapers or his fortune; the "healthiest city" claim has no government source; and the healing figures were Lake's own. His sympathetic biographer, Kemp Burpeau, had also found no corroboration of the business career. The theologian Marius Nel (2016) has defended Lake's sincerity and ministry against parts of Morton's critique, arguing that Morton read the sources too uncharitably and judged him by standards foreign to early Pentecostalism.

Key dates

• 1870 - Born at St Marys, Ontario, 18 March
• 1890s - Marries Jennie Stevens
• 1901 - Moves to Zion City
• 1907 - Baptism in the Spirit
• 1908 - Sails for South Africa; Jennie Lake dies in December
• 1908-09 - Helps form the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa; becomes its president
• 1913 - Returns to America; marries Florence Switzer
• 1914-20 - Healing rooms in Spokane
• 1920 - Moves to Portland, Oregon
• 1931 - Returns to Spokane
• 16 September 1935 - Dies in Spokane

Teachings and claims

Healing as God's will

Lake taught that sickness is from the devil and healing always God's will, provided in the atonement. Like Dowie, he regarded reliance on doctors as a lack of faith, though he later spoke more mildly.

Spirit-man and "God-men"

He taught that the baptism in the Spirit makes the believer a channel of divine power, even a "God-man" in whom Christ's own life is reproduced. In one sermon he said, "The real Christian is a God-man... God's intention is that every man be a God-man."^†

Restoration of apostolic power

He saw the Pentecostal revival as the restoration of the apostolic Church, with miracles as its normal sign.

Scientific claims

He described healing in quasi-scientific language, claiming that the Spirit's power could be seen killing germs under a microscope - a claim widely repeated in later healing ministries.^†

Documented controversies

• His biography. As set out above, Morton (2012) argued that Lake fabricated much of his career and inflated his results; Burpeau (2004) also found no corroboration for his business claims. Nel (2016) defends him in part.
• South African finances. Accusations of misusing AFM funds were made in South Africa; Morton reports that these were eventually disproved.
• Race in South Africa. Lake preached to mixed audiences at first, but the AFM soon segregated its work, and his later statements on race relations have been criticised.^†
• The "God-man" language, which critics have seen as anticipating the little-gods teaching of later Word of Faith preachers.
• His wife's death. Some critics have asked whether Jennie's death reflected the hardships of going to Africa with no support and the refusal of medical care.

Death

Lake suffered a stroke in 1935 and died in Spokane on 16 September 1935, aged 65.

Legacy

The Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa, which he helped found, is one of the country's largest churches, with well over a million members. The Zionist churches it influenced are among the largest religious movements in southern Africa.

Lake's sermons and the stories of his healing rooms were revived by Gordon Lindsay, who published them in the 1950s, and by later charismatic ministries, which reopened "healing rooms" in Spokane in 1999 and spread them worldwide. He is often cited as a hero of faith in Word of Faith and healing circles, usually on the basis of his own account.

Measured against the creeds

The Church honours missionaries who went out in poverty and preached Christ, and there is no doubt that the movement Lake helped start in South Africa brought many to faith. His teaching on healing, however, carried Dowie's view that sickness is never God's will and that medicine shows a lack of faith, which the historic Church has never held. His description of believers as "God-men" also confuses two things the Church distinguishes with care: union with God by grace, which the Fathers call deification, and the one Person of Christ, who alone is God and man by nature (Council of Chalcedon, 451).

The serious doubts about his own account of his life are also a warning. Where a ministry's authority rests on the leader's testimony of wealth renounced and wonders done, that testimony must be true; St Paul insisted that "we have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty" (2 Corinthians 4:2).

Major writings

Lake wrote no books in his lifetime; his sermons were collected and published later.

• John G. Lake: His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith (Kenneth Copeland Publications, 1994)