Jonathan was astounded. Could this man be the new worker he had prayed for?
The two men talked for a long time as Jonathan explained to Su Chuangting what it would be like to travel with him. There would be few home comforts, they would walk for many hours each day, people would spit and throw rocks at them, and sometimes they would go hungry. Jonathan made the missionary life sound as grim as he possibly could, but it did not deter Su Chuangting. When Jonathan had finished, Su Chuangting was still eager to go with him. “I will go and get my belongings from my house,” he told Jonathan, “and this afternoon I will be ready to follow you wherever you go.”
That is exactly what he did. Indeed, Su Chuangting turned out to be an intelligent student. Within a year he was a very popular and powerful speaker. He worked tirelessly alongside Jonathan. The two men worked together for five years until Jonathan’s health began to deteriorate.
By mid-1915, Jonathan was so weak and ill that he had to be admitted to the hospital. His doctor warned him sternly. “Mr. Goforth,” he said, “do not return to Changte to work. If you do, you will be committing suicide as surely as if you were to take an overdose of opium.”
Jonathan took the doctor’s advice and returned to Canada with his family to regain his strength. By now Jonathan was fifty-six years old and Rosalind was fifty-one. No one would have blamed them for retiring, but that word was not in Jonathan Goforth’s vocabulary! There was work to do, and while he still had breath, he would do it.
The Presbyterian Mission Board in Canada would not give Jonathan permission to return to Changte to live, even though he was the founder and leader of all the Presbyterian mission work in Honan province. The climate in Changte was harsh, and they feared Jonathan would become sick again. They suggested the Goforths find a place with a more temperate climate to settle in. Eventually Jonathan decided on Kikungshan, located on a high plateau about three hundred miles south of Changte. It was a popular health resort destination and had a temperate climate year-round.
The Goforths returned to China to set up their new home. They planned on spending several quiet months settling into their new surroundings, but a week after arriving, Jonathan received an urgent request that he could not refuse. The request came from General Feng Yu-Hsiang, a man Jonathan had heard about but had never met. General Feng had been a nineteen-year-old soldier during the Boxer Rebellion. At that time, he had vehemently believed that all foreigners should be killed and had followed up his beliefs with action. In the city of Paotingfu, his company of soldiers, along with a mob of Boxers, had been responsible for the massacre of an entire group of American Board missionaries and their children, along with all the Chinese Christian converts in the area. Later the same summer, the company had participated in the torching of a house in southern Honan province in which a number of Presbyterian missionaries and their children had perished.
Of all the many deaths General Feng witnessed during the Boxer Rebellion, two incidents related to the massacre of the missionaries disturbed him the most. When he thought back to the killing of the American Board missionaries in Paotingfu, he remembered one missionary, whose name he later learned was Miss Morrell. She had stood outside the mission compound gates pleading with the mob of soldiers and Boxers to kill her and spare the lives of the other missionaries. In the end, the mob showed no mercy and killed all the missionaries. Over the years, as General Feng thought back to this event, he could not fathom the faith and courage of someone who was willing to die in the place of her friends. He knew he did not have friends who would be that loyal to him, and he began to ask himself where that kind of fearless love came from. And at the burning of the Presbyterian mission house, General Feng had watched in amazement as the missionary occupants of the house were overcome with fire and smoke. None of them were frantic; none of them panicked. One image was etched in his memory from that day. On the upstairs veranda, a father had stood tenderly holding his young son as the two of them waited to die in the flames. The father seemed so at peace as he comforted his son. Again General Feng wondered where the kind of peace the father displayed came from.
After the foreign powers had stepped in to end the Boxer Rebellion, General Feng found himself becoming more and more disturbed by the images of those dying missionaries and the questions their deaths had raised in his mind. Eventually, in 1911, he heard of a large Christian gathering being held by an American named John R. Mott. General Feng went to the gathering looking for answers to his questions about the amazing behavior of these Christians in the face of death. He left the meeting a Christian convert. From that day on, General Feng spoke out boldly about his new faith. He quickly became well respected for his moral values and his fairness both by the men who served under him and by his superiors.
Now General Feng had sent a messenger to Jonathan asking him to speak to the thousands of soldiers under his command. The army was stationed about three days’ journey south in a hot region of the country just beyond the Yangtze River. It was not a good time for such an invitation to arrive. China was in the grip of a searing summer, and the Goforths were even feeling its effects up in their new home. But worse than the thought of going to the hot valleys was the news that cholera had broken out down there. Still, Jonathan did not hesitate for a moment. The opportunity was too good to miss, and so the Goforths packed their bags and went to meet General Feng and his army.
When Jonathan met General Feng for the first time, the general told him about his conversion and how thousands of members of the army, along with their wives and children, were becoming Christians.
During one of the services with the soldiers, Jonathan turned to the general, who was seated on the platform next to him, and asked, “General Feng, would you tell us what you were like nine years ago before you trusted yourself to the Lord Jesus Christ?”
General Feng jumped to his feet. “I was a devil back then,” he began. “I had a demon temper. Even if an officer offended me, I would yell at him and box his ears. At that time my men all hated me, and I know they would have stuck a knife in me if they had the opportunity. Then Jesus Christ came into my heart and took control. His divine love took over. Since then I have ruled with love and not my bad temper, and I assure you tonight that all my men would die for me.”
The assembled men cheered, and Jonathan could see the love they had for their leader.
It had been arranged for Jonathan to speak at two meetings a day for ten days, and General Feng expected all one thousand of his officers to be in attendance at the meetings. By the end of the visit, Jonathan had baptized five hundred seven army officers, along with hundreds of women and children. The Goforths returned to their new home greatly encouraged and ready to take on the next challenge that came their way.
Although Jonathan and Rosalind’s official address was Kikungshan, they continued their nomadic life, spending an average of five days at a time in any one place. General Feng invited them back to speak to his troops again, and all in all, over four thousand soldiers were baptized as a result of Jonathan’s preaching.
In the summer of 1920, the Goforths faced a difficult challenge. The whole of North-Central China was experiencing a devastating famine. Between thirty million and forty million people were starving to death. All of the missionaries in the area put aside their other work and did their best to alleviate people’s suffering in any way they could.
Jonathan went to Changte to help out, but Rosalind was too sick to go with him. It was only later that Jonathan found out how his wife had played a part in saving thousands of lives. Rosalind had been desperately searching for some way to help with famine relief when it came to her that she should write an appeal letter for funds. She wrote a single page, outlining the information she had been given by various foreigners who had come to Kikungshan for health reasons. She then took the letter to a neighbor, who had a mimeograph machine, and had one hundred fifty copies made. She visited all the foreign missionaries staying nearby and handed out copies of the letter. Within twenty-four hours, Rosalind’s letter had been translated into at least ten languages and sent out around the world.
Money for famine relief began to flow in from all over the globe. Rosalind herself received over one hundred twenty thousand dollars to go to famine relief, and many other missionaries were sent that much or more. All in all, Rosalind’s one-page letter, written in less than half an hour, saved tens of thousands of lives. It did something else, too. It opened the hearts of many Chinese people to the message the missionaries had come to share.
Of course, Jonathan was determined to make the most of this openness. He planned an extensive tent campaign throughout the entire Changte area. Rosalind went with him. By then it was early winter, and together they braved icy-cold conditions to get the gospel message out. They slept in old huts, with the wind howling through the cracks in the walls and the rain trickling through the roof. Jonathan felt that every hardship was nothing compared to the joy of leading over three thousand people to faith in Christ during those winter months.
In the summer, Jonathan was invited back to speak to General Feng’s army. He was eager to speak to them again and delighted to read what the local newspapers said about the soldiers. One Chinese reporter wrote:
Other soldiers when they came seized our houses and public buildings and made off with anything they took a fancy to, and our wives and daughters were at their mercy so that the people called them the soldiers of hell. Now General Feng leads his men through the city and nothing is disturbed and no one is molested. Even the General lives in a tent, as his men do, and everything they need they buy, and no one is abused. The people are so delighted they call them the soldiers of heaven.
Jonathan couldn’t have been happier when he read this report and many others like it. He always preached that the gospel had the power to change lives, and now many people in China were able to see that life-changing power at work for themselves. In a letter home he wrote, “I am sixty-five today.…Oh, how I covet, more than a miser his gold, twenty more years for this soul-saving work.”
Jonathan did not know, however, that on the other side of the Pacific Ocean the Presbyterian Foreign Missions Board was making decisions that would affect the rest of his life. It was not until he got home to Canada on furlough that he found out what those decisions were.
Chapter 14
Manchuria
Back home in Canada, Jonathan Goforth once again set out on a daunting round of meetings, over four hundred of them. At these services many people would ask him, “Are you going to retire?” Jonathan’s reply was always the same. “I’m not going to sit in a rocking chair and wait to die, not while there is work to be done!”
The Presbyterian Foreign Missions Board, however, was not in good financial shape. It was over $166,000 in debt and was looking for ways to save money. One money-saving idea it came up with was to combine much of its missionary work in China with the work of other missions. This plan not only reduced the total number of missionaries serving in the field but also cut down on how many mission stations it needed to support. It was decided that the North Honan region, which included the Changte area, would be blended into this new combined mission that was to be called the Union Mission.
Almost overnight, Jonathan no longer had a role to play in the region that had been his home and base of work for so many years. Still, not willing to give up his missionary work, the now sixty-five-year-old white-haired Canadian searched for another way to go back to China. Eventually he was able to persuade the Presbyterian Foreign Missions Board to let him return to China and try to establish a new mission in an area where no other missionaries were working. Because the political situation in China was still very unstable, the board left it up to Jonathan to decide where this would be once he had returned.
