Eventually everything was done. New windows and doors had been installed, and chairs had been brought in and arranged in the large room. The meeting hall opened for services, and within days, crowds were gathering to hear Jonathan and Allan take turns preaching. In only two weeks, four hundred people had become Christian converts. Jonathan immediately sent to Szepingkai for some workers to come to help disciple the new converts.
One evening, as he sat on a broken chair by the stove, Jonathan was overcome as he thought about the wonderful life he was leading. He turned to Rosalind and said, “Isn’t it grand to be out here opening up such a place to the gospel. I’d rather be right here than in Windsor Castle.” This was the kind of contagious enthusiasm that inspired all those who worked with him.
The new mission center in Taonan had been open only a month when word came from Nancy Graham that she was going to leave Szepingkai and set up a new mission station at Tungliao. This left Jonathan in a difficult position. He respected Nancy’s right to work where she felt called, but the Szepingkai mission was a large one and needed a strong leader. Since Annie Kok was not ready or able to take over the men’s side of the work, Jonathan reluctantly made plans to move back to Szepingkai. He left Allan Reoch in charge of the flood of new believers at the Taonan mission church.
The Goforths arrived back in Szepingkai just in time for a brutal winter. They moved into the rooms above the meeting hall, but the only room with a fireplace was their bedroom. As a result, Jonathan was forced to store everything perishable—eggs, apples, canned milk, and potatoes—under their bed so that it would not freeze. Even with a blazing fire roaring in the fireplace, often in the morning Jonathan had to crack the ice that had formed on the top of the water jug.
As the winter progressed, Jonathan began having trouble with his teeth, and in December 1928, he had them all extracted. The operation did not go as well as hoped, and an infection developed in his lower jaw. Jonathan was in so much pain that he was unable to climb down the stairs from his room for four months.
About this time, the Goforths’ youngest child, Fred, arrived from Canada with a typewriter. He had often thought his father should record some of his missionary stories, and he arrived intending to do just that. Every morning father and son would go back through Jonathan’s old journals and talk about his early missionary experiences in China. By the time Fred left four months later, he had a complete manuscript to take with him. The manuscript became the book By My Spirit and was published the following year.
Soon it was time for Jonathan and Rosalind to take another furlough in Canada. They might have chosen to stay in Manchuria except that Rosalind was beginning to lose her sight and she needed to see a specialist. They left behind them a thriving work with thirty evangelists and church workers who were supported by a continuing supply of donations.
On furlough, as the Goforths traveled around Canada and the eastern United States speaking about their work in Manchuria, Jonathan also began to have difficulties with his eyesight. A doctor examined him and diagnosed his condition as a detached retina in his right eye. Several operations were performed in an attempt to reattach the retina, but none of them worked. The surgeon eventually told Jonathan that he would never see out of that eye again. Rosalind’s eye operation, on the other hand, was a complete success, and soon she was seeing as well as before.
Once again, Jonathan used his illness as an opportunity to dictate a book. This time Margaret Gay, a nurse and former missionary in Honan province, typed up his account, which became the popular selling book Miracle Lives of China.
In 1931, Jonathan and Rosalind Goforth set out for the mission field yet again. The two of them stood on the aft deck of the ship and watched the Olympic Mountains of Washington state slip from view. Both of them thought they were seeing North America for the last time. They were committed to spending their last years on the mission field.
The Goforths continued to work in Manchuria and “vacationed” in Changte. On these vacations, Jonathan would preach at four meetings a day for a week, and each meeting attracted between eight hundred and a thousand people. While in Changte, Jonathan and Rosalind also visited the graves of the three little children they had buried thirty years before. After the death of Constance in October 1902 and Rosalind’s subsequent prayer committing herself and her children into God’s care, not one of their other children had died. As they stood beside the three small graves, Jonathan did not know it, but it would be the last time he would see them. He was about to go completely blind.
In March 1933, Jonathan felt a strange sensation in his left eye, followed by darkness. Rosalind took him to the best doctor in Peking, who concluded that the retina in Jonathan’s left eye had detached, just as the one in his right eye had done two years before. Various surgical operations were performed, but nothing worked, and Jonathan Goforth never saw again.
For a brief few days Jonathan thought his years of ministry were over. He could no longer read or write or see the expressions on the faces of the people he was talking to. But as the finality of his blindness settled over him, he began to discover all the things he could still do. He had read the entire Bible through seventy-three times during his life, and he knew most of the New Testament by heart, in both English and Mandarin. When Chinese Christians came to him, he listened carefully to their concerns and from memory was able to give them the right verse, parable, or story from the Bible to help them with their problem. He could still pray, and he could dictate letters to his fellow workers in the outlying areas of Manchuria. When Jonathan Goforth eventually left Peking to return to Manchuria, his mind was made up. Blindness might cause him a few minor difficulties, but it would not stop him from completing the work he still had to do.
Chapter 15
Faithful Servant of Jesus Christ
The situation was tenser than ever when the Goforths returned to Manchuria. By now the Japanese had created a puppet state there, and they were busy promoting their own interests. Gangs of bandits roamed the countryside looking for victims. Sometimes there were up to a thousand bandits in these gangs, which would often take over entire towns and villages, looting and vandalizing everything. The bandits hated anything to do with the foreign powers, including the Christian religion. They took special delight in murdering Chinese Christians and burning down churches. Still, Jonathan was grateful that despite the persecution, most Christians held firm.
Many stories were relayed to Jonathan about the bravery of Christians in the face of these bandits. The story that thrilled him the most was that of the Sun girls. Sun Wen and Sun Guang were cousins, aged twelve and fourteen. Their family belonged to the church in Fanchiatun, north of Szepingkai. When Jonathan paid one of his many visits there, Sun Wen told him about her encounter with the bandits.
“Three weeks ago,” Sun Wen began, “my mother yelled that there were bandits at the front gate. Everyone panicked and ran out of the house, escaping through the back courtyard, except for my cousin Guang. I was looking for her when the bandits began battering down the door. Just then my cousin yelled that she was in the storage room, but it was too late for me to run to her. So I just knelt down on the floor and began to pray. When the door burst open, about twenty men rushed in. The leader of the gang grabbed me by the throat and said, ‘Tell me where your father is, girl, or I will kill you.’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and I didn’t. I had no idea in which direction my family had fled.”
When Sun Wen stopped to catch her breath, Jonathan leaned in to hear the rest of her story.
“Anyway,” she went on, “this made the bandit very angry, and he started squeezing my throat more tightly, yelling, ‘You’re lying. You’re lying.’ ‘No,’ I told him, ‘I am a Christian.’ Then I had a strange idea. I felt that I should offer to sing to the leader, so I said, ‘I think you would enjoy my singing.’ The bandit looked at me strangely, and then he took his hands off my throat and stood back. I began singing, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…’ At first no one paid much attention to me. The bandits were running around piling up all the valuables in the house, ready to load them into their carts. But one by one they stopped to listen. When I was finished, several of them yelled, ‘More, sing us more!’ Then I thought of Guang hiding in the other room. I had an idea, ‘Oh, I love to sing,’ I said, ‘but my cousin is in the other room, and she sings much better than me. I will call her, and we will sing to you together.’ I called Guang, and she came out of her hiding place. We began to sing the second verse of the chorus. When we were finished, the head bandit said, ‘We must stop looting now and put everything back the way it was.’ Then he began dragging a large urn back against the wall. Before he left, do you know what he did?” Sun Wen asked Jonathan.
“No,” he replied. “Tell me.”
“He pulled some money from his pocket and gave Guang and me a dollar each.”
“Weren’t you scared when you were surrounded by the bandits?” Jonathan asked.
“Oh no!” exclaimed Sun Wen. “I knew the Lord Jesus was with me.”
Jonathan wondered how many Christians in Canada would have displayed the same kind of faith as Sun Wen in the face of such a terrifying situation.
Despite the encouraging reports that Jonathan and Allan Reoch forwarded to Canada, the Presbyterian Foreign Missions Board sent word in June 1933 that it was going to drastically cut funding for the work in Manchuria. Europe and North America were in the midst of the Great Depression, and there was simply not enough money to send to missionaries. At first Jonathan was troubled by the board’s decision. He feared he would be forced to dismiss many of the seventy full-time Chinese and Manchurian workers who served with the mission. He worried about the impact this would have on the forty new churches that had sprung up around the region.
Jonathan need not have worried, because an interesting thing began to happen. As he told the Manchurian Christians that their pastors and workers might lose their jobs, the churches themselves rose up to take on the financial responsibility for their workers. Even though the Canadian churches stopped supporting them, not a single worker had to leave because of lack of funds. It was an amazing responsibility for such new churches. In 1932, the Manchurian churches had given $4,312 towards their own missionaries’ salaries and the general running of their churches. By the end of 1934, this amount had risen to $14,065! Baptisms were up, too. In 1932, 472 adults were baptized, and by late 1934, the number had grown to 966. By all accounts, the churches in Manchuria were thriving.
Jonathan’s health, though, was not doing so well. Jonathan insisted on continuing to hold meetings all over Manchuria. The local people flocked to hear him. They eagerly asked him questions, and together they discussed the meaning of passages from the Bible. Jonathan never complained to any of them, not even his wife, about his blindness. He also came close to death several times in 1934, first from a bout of the flu and then from pneumonia. Still, he would not consider giving up his post, at least not until three things happened that caused him to reconsider.
First, Jonathan received a letter from a well-known Presbyterian pastor in Toronto urging him to consider returning to Canada. Jonathan churned the words over in his mind. “I very well understand that you will feel that you ought to stay at the post of duty up to the very end—but have you ever thought that God may be demanding the greater sacrifice of your coming home and, out of your ripe experience, rekindling the fires of missionary zeal that are, I assure you, on the decline in the Home Church.”
