There are radically different views on who John G. Lake was and what he did. To many charismatics and those in the NAR, Lake was a “faith healer,” revivalist, and missionary. Bill Johnson, of Bethel Church in Redding California, said: “His insights into the Spirit-filled life are the greatest I have seen anywhere.” Johnson thought Lake was 100 years ahead of his time, and that his insights were “just absolutely stunning.” Yet there is also evidence that he was a fraud, faked his biography, and falsely claimed he had “healed” over 100,000 individuals without providing evidence those healings were genuine.
God TV has a positive, 12-minute YouTube video on Lake as a missionary, revivalist and healer. You will hear that when he visited Alexander Dowie’s healing home in Chicago, he was exposed to “God’s healing power.” While there, Lake claimed he was instantly healed of rheumatism. “Alexander Dowie was really a revolutionary in John G. Lake’s life because he brought this new healing anointing, this new opportunity to pray for healing, and it personally impacted on so many levels.” Reflecting on this part of Lake’s life, Bill Johnson said, “It’s strange but in the kingdom oftentimes some of our great heroes of faith are actually people that refuse to be a victim to things like sickness.” Yet Dowie has been called The Prototype of Pentecostal Frauds; see John Alexander Dowie, on William Branham Historical Research for more information on Dowie.
In 1899, Lake was said to have prayed for and “healed” his wife. He was told by a minister to prepare for his wife’s death. But when in anger he threw his Bible onto the table, it opened to Acts 10:38, “How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed of the devil, for God was with him.” Struck by the words, oppressed of the devil, he realized the enemy was the author of poverty, sicken, and death. He realized that sickness came from the enemy, and that God was a God of healing. Bill Johnson said:
When he saw in the Word that it was God’s intent to heal, he could never again be okay with sickness. He could never again allow people’s lives to be ravaged by sickness, disease and plagues, whatever.
The narrator of the video said Lake knelt down beside his wife’s bed and full of faith, called out for God to heal her. “The power of God came upon her, and she stood up crying out ‘Praise God!’” The news of her healing spread around the country and people began to come to receive prayer for their own healing. After moving his family to Chicago in 1904, Lake attended a church service where the pastor spoke of the need for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. As he began to pray, he said he felt “waves of holy glory pass through him,” lifting him up into a new realm of God’s presence and power. But Lake wasn’t satisfied with this experience. Bill Johnson said:
He had what many around him called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. In other words, he filled the criteria of manifestation or experience or whatever, but he knew there was more. He knew there was more, and he set his heart to seek God and tell something happened to him that was beyond what he could explain.
Afterwards, Lake would say he felt a call into fulltime ministry “during this time.” Then he heard the Lord call him to Africa. So, in 1908, Lake his wife and seven children went to South Africa. Supposedly, he was met with great ministry success in Africa. Eventually, the leaders of the AFM (Apostolic Faith Mission) became aware of his lies and exaggerations and believed him to be guilty of serious misconduct. A set of charges were brought against Lake, accusing him of financial improprieties, failing to send promised funds to AFM ministers, of exaggerated reports of miracles and healings, and of being “dictatorial.”
Reportedly, Gandhi himself praised Lake’s ministries and declared that Lake’s teachings would be eventually accepted by the entire world. Lake returned to the United States in 1913, and began to minister in Portland, Oregon. He started The Divine Healing Institute and opened what he would call “healing rooms” in 1914, patterned after John Alexander Dowie’s healing homes. He ran these healing rooms from 1915 to 1920. In 1999, Cal Pierce reopened Lake’s “healing rooms” in Spokane, Washington.
Distorting the Lord’s Prayer
Nevertheless, Bill Johnson considered John G. Lake to be one of the great heroes of the faith, illustrated by the positive quotes above. It seems Lake’s teachings on healing were the source of Johnson’s own theology of healing. In his book Defining Moments, Bill Johnson said: “In some ways, John G. Lake has had more of an impact on my life than any other historical figure. His understanding of the kingdom of God and the life of dominion over the powers of darkness is unparalleled.”
It is also apparent Johnson is unaware of, or ignored the concerns with Lake and his practices. In Reckless Christianity, Holly Pivec and Doug Geivett said Johnson believes it is always God’s will to heal a person of sickness or disease—without exception. According to Johnson, the goodness of God means He never causes or allows sickness or suffering: “I refuse to create a theology that allows for sickness.” Pivec and Geivett said:
Of course, this new understanding of God’s goodness parts ways with the views of most other Christians, who also tenaciously uphold God’s goodness, yet whose theology does allow for sickness. Those include classical Pentecostals and historic charismatics (who believe that divine healing is available to believers but also acknowledge that God does not always choose to heal).
Based on his understanding of the Lord’s Prayer, Johnson believes Christians are to “bring heaven to earth.” In When Heaven Invades Earth, referring to the phrase “Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” in the Lord’s Prayer, Johnson said this was the primary focus of all prayer: “if it exists in heaven, it is to be loosed on earth.” And if it is not free to exist in heaven, it must be bound here. Pivec and Geivett elaborated on this point in Reckless Christianity, by quoting Johnson in The Supernatural Power:
When we pray, ‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,” we’re praying for the King’s dominion and will to be realized right here, right now. . . What is free to operate in Heaven—joy, peace, wisdom, health, wholeness, and all the other good promises we read about in the Bible—should be free to operate here on this planet, in your home, your church, your business, and your school. What is not free to operate there—sickness, disease, spiritual bondage, and sin—should not be free to operate here, period.
There is no sickness or disease in heaven, therefore, “for heaven to come to earth means that none of those things should be found on earth either.” Christians have been given the task of making earth an unqualified reflection of heaven. Johnson said: “My assignment isn’t to go to heaven; my assignment is to bring heaven. . . We’ve been given a mission and that mission is to pull on the reality of that world until it manifests in this one.” For more discussion on this topic, see “Deconstructing the Lord’s Prayer.”
A Fraud and a Con Man
Barry Morton of the University of South Africa has written several articles on how John G. Lake, who was the initiator of Pentecostalism in southern Africa, was a fraud and a con man, including: “John G. Lake’s Formative Years, 1870-1908: The Making of a Con Man” and “Yes, John G. Lake Was a Con Man.” He thought Lake was one of the most influential religious con men of the twentieth century. Morton said his career as a con man began when he was a member of John Alexander Dowie’s church in 1890s America. There Lake learned the art of faith healing from Alexander Dowie by organizing false testimonials of so-called “healings.” Acting as an audience plant, he even pretended to be a minister for him. Members of Lake’s family, including his wife, brother and sisters testified falsely of their healings.
In late 1896, after having left Chicago, Lake and his family members helped Dowie stage a “distant miracle” at a Chicago meeting. The “distant miracle” was one of Dowie’s favorite faith healing cons, and Lake himself would go on to use it many times and spread the technique in South Africa. In this case, Lake used his older sister, Maggie, to help Dowie effect the con. In this case, the deception involved a fake telegram, a messenger to take it to Dowie, and Maggie Lake to act as an audience plant. Just as Fred Lake was brought in from Sault Ste Marie to be healed, in this case Maggie Lake journeyed south from her hometown to execute the con.
In August [of 1898] Lake helped effect a second dramatic faith cure. While visiting the local charity home in Sault Ste Marie in August, Lake found an orphan named Georgie Armor who was apparently both comatose and also “in convulsions”. Lake contacted Dowie, who prayed for the boy, and who awoke from his coma afterwards. Several days later one Claude Stephens was also healed by Dowie after another telegram. Lake maintained in the Leaves of Healing that Armor’s healing caused considerable commotion in town. Once again, as in the case of the Harvey testimonials from the early 1890s, neither Armor nor Stephens is listed in any historical documents, and neither was counted in the 1900 census. Neither one seems to have ever existed! Lake also enlisted his sister Maggie to testify to another cure for Dowie. In 1900 she testified to having had “five cancers” that a number of doctors in Detroit had failed to find a cure for. The Lakes brought her to Chicago, and took her into a Dowie service on a stretcher, and soon she “was utterly healed” and the tumors were expelled from her body by Dowie. Yet another of Lake’s sisters soon after seems to have contracted a hemophiliac-type problem relating “the issue of blood,” and was healed in absentia by Dowie after her heart had stopped beating. By 1900, then, seven of the Lakes had been miraculously cured by Dowie.
Lake invented an extensive and fictitious biography. He was not a minister, as claimed. He concocted a story of being cured of rheumatism by faith alone as a young man. He embellished the story of how he met his wife, Jennie. She was described as someone with many incurable ailments by Lake. “His many conflicting statements about her health, along with her dubious testimony regarding miraculous cures that she had undergone, lead one to doubt that she had any ailments at all.” Contradictorily, Lake claimed she had tuberculosis and repeated paralysis in the mid-1890s, “but these afflictions seem inconsistent with a woman delivering healthy children at the same time.”
Jennie Lake was the perfect wife for Lake. A prim, quiet, ostensibly religious woman, she repeatedly was willing to testify on numerous occasions to miraculous healings that she never in fact experienced. From fairly early on in their marriage, Jennie was willing to support Lake’s various cons and never deviated from his own narratives.
He also claimed a dubious divine calling to South Africa that obscured his involvement in gruesome killings in Zion IL. He claimed he had two visions, with “the voice” of the Holy Spirit instructing him to go preach in South Africa. See “Yes, John G. Lake Was a Con Man” for more on this.
Once in South Africa, Lake and his missionary party used the faith healing techniques that Dowie had perfected to build up the AFM [Apostolic Faith Mission]. While doing so, he trained a number of Africans to use these methods, and in doing so inadvertently set the stage for the explosion of Zionist Christianity across the region as evangelists such as Isaiah Shembe adopted his methods.
In “Proof that John G. Lake Was a Fraud!,” Daniel Long of the YouTube channel LongforTruth reviewed three newspaper articles that he said that proved Lake was a fraud. Lake was convicted and jailed for “Blue Sky Fraud,” which was securities fraud that violated state-level regulations known as blue sky laws. Long provided links to the original newspaper articles in the YouTube description.
The William Branham Historical Research website reported when John G. Lake returned to the U.S. from South Africa in 1913, he attempted to recreate Dowie’s empire in Portland, Oregon. He was exposed by newspapers multiple times for fraudulent and criminal activity. A few weeks after Lake and his son were charged with committing securities fraud, Lake attempted to seize property while impersonating a police officer and was arrested.
Despite this evidence of Lake’s dishonesty and cons, he is still a hero of the faith propagated at Bethel Church. A search for “John G. Lake” in their bookstore found several books by Lake or about Lake. There is a biography on Lake by Kenneth Copeland. There is a book on Lake’s teachings on healing. Two of Lake’s works are available as ebooks.
Unsurprisingly then, in When Heaven Invades Earth, Bill Johnson approvingly cited a sermon by Lake on salvation: “The gospel of salvation is to touch the whole man, spirit, soul, and body. John G. Lake called this a Triune Salvation.” Remember that Lake falsely claimed to have attended seminary, impersonated a police officer, and was convicted of fraud. There was overwhelming evidence Lake was a false teacher; a wolf in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15). Instead of testing to see whether or not Lake was a false teacher bringing in destructive heresies (1 John 4:1; 2 Peter 2:1), Johnson endorsed him as one of the great heroes of the faith and welcomed him into the church.
