JONATHAN & ROSALIND GOFORTH

JONATHAN & ROSALIND GOFORTH

China’s "Flaming Preacher"

When young Jonathan Goforth arrived at Knox College in Toronto, Canada, his classmates teased him cruelly. Born February 2, 1859, he had grown up as a poor farm boy. He wore shabby clothes and didn’t understand city ways. To improve his appearance at college, he bought some cloth, but before he could get it sewn into new clothes, his fellow students woke him up in the middle of the night. They tied it around his neck like a cape and made him run up and down the dorm hallway, poking fun at him.

They may have laughed at him then, but before he graduated in 1886, his classmates came to respect him so much that they raised the money to send him to China as a missionary. They had seen his sincerity in preaching at rescue missions in Toronto, visiting prisons, and witnessing door-to-door.

The following year Jonathan met and married Rosalind Bell Smith, an attractive, talented, and well-educated woman who had been born (May 6,1864) and raised in London in a wealthy English family.

In 1888 the Goforths, sailed for China, where Jonathan found the Chinese language very difficult to learn as they attempted to adjust to a new culture. Over the years, they had eleven children, only to suffer the sorrow of seeing five of them die very young.

A powerful evangelist, Jonathan became known as the "flaming preacher," sometimes speaking to as many as twenty-five thousand at a time. But the Goforths also used what they called "open-house" evangelism. The Chinese people were curious about how they lived, especially some of their furnishings like a kitchen stove, a sewing machine, and an organ. So they arranged tours of their house all day long. Before they would take a group of fifty people through the house, Rosalind would preach to the women, and Jonathan would preach to the men.

By 1900 an organized revolt known as the Boxer Rebellion had spread throughout China. Its purpose was to drive all foreigners from the country. The Chinese empress encouraged it because Japanese and Western outsiders seemed to be taking over the country. Thousands of foreigners were killed, and the Goforths fled a thousand miles across China to escape. On the way, an angry crowd of men attacked Jonathan and nearly beat him to death with a sword.

When they returned to China about a year later, their approach changed to a traveling evangelistic ministry that produced more than thirteen thousand converts between 1908 and 1913 alone.

The Goforths worked in China for forty-six years before poor health forced them to return to Canada in 1934. In addition to their many converts, they trained sixty-one full-time Chinese evangelists and Bible teachers and established thirty mission stations.

Jonathan died on October 8, 1936, and Rosalind joined him in heaven on May 31, 1942.