John G. Lake

Early life and career

Lake was born in St. Marys, Ontario, Canada and moved to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan with his family in 1886. He was born into a large family of 16 siblings (eight of whom died young). He graduated from high school in St Mary's shortly before the move to Michigan, and claimed to have been ordained into the Methodist ministry at the age of twenty-one. However, his seminary attendance has never been confirmed and census records cannot confirm even ten years' education. Lake, then, may have had no formal theological training.

Lake moved to a suburb of Chicago, Harvey, in 1890, where he worked as a roofer and construction worker before returning to his hometown in 1896. According to Lake, he became an industrious businessman and started two newspapers, the Harvey Citizen in Harvey, Illinois and the Soo Times in Sault Ste. Marie, before beginning a successful career in real estate, and later, becoming a millionaire in life insurance dealings. Historian Barry Morton found no evidence that Lake ever owned the two newspapers, citing sources which indicate the Harvey Citizen was founded by the Harvey township, and the Soo Times was started by George A. Ferris and owned by Ferris & Scott Publishers. Morton further alleges that Lake exaggerated his business career, and that "clear evidence" shows Lake instead worked as a small-scale contractor, roofer and "house-flipper". In the 1900 Census, Lake's occupation is listed as "carpenter".

In February 1893, Lake married Jennie Stevens of Newberry, Michigan, and the two had six children and adopted another before her death in 1908. During the 1890s Lake and many members of his family began appearing regularly in Dowie's services, where attendees were purportedly healed and allegedly brought back from death's door. In 1898 Lake opened a small chapter of Dowie's Christian Catholic Church in Sault Ste Marie and held meetings in the attic of his parents' home. In 1901 he relocated his family to Zion, Illinois, where he worked in the theocratic town's construction department.

After massive retrenchments affected ever-bankrupt Zion City, Lake found new employment around 1905. He later claimed that he maintained relationships with many of the leading figures of his day including railroad tycoon James Jerome Hill, Cecil Rhodes, Mahatma Gandhi, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others. When he began his preaching career, he claimed to have walked away from a $50,000 year salary (around $1.25 million in 2007 US dollars), as well as his seat on the Chicago Board of Trade. Lake's biographer, Burpeau, reported no evidence outside of Lake's own assertions that Lake was connected to these wealthy financiers and industrialists. According to Morton, contemporary records show that Lake never left Zion City at the time Lake was said to be making his name in Chicago; he instead worked in nearby Waukegan as an "ordinary, small-town insurance salesman". Lake does not appear in contemporary newspapers until 1907 where he gave an account of his experience of speaking in tongues.

In 1907, Lake was converted to Pentecostalism when Charles Parham staged a tent revival in Zion in an attempt to woo Dowie's supporters. After Parham's departure a group of several hundred "Parhamites" remained in Zion, led by Thomas Hezmalhalch—a recent arrival from the Azusa Street Revival. As 1907 wore on, Lake grew in stature among this group, and was usually listed as co-leader. After Parham's arrest for reports of sodomy and pedophilia in the summer of 1907, the Parhamites descended into disorganization. Believing that many had been possessed by demons, a number of brutal exorcisms began, in which at least two deaths occurred. In the face of arrests and potential mob violence, the Parhamites were forced to flee en masse from Illinois. Lake and Hezmalhalch left for Indianapolis. Once there, they raised $2000 to finance a Pentecostal mission to South Africa.