Jonathan Goforth became the foremost missionary revivalist in early twentieth-century China and helped to establish revivalism as a major element in Protestant China missions. He grew up on an Ontario farm, the seventh of eleven children. Hearing G. L. Mackay, Presbyterian missionary to Formosa (Taiwan), speak, he sensed God's call to go to China. Attending Knox College for training, Goforth met Rosalind Bell-Smith at the Toronto Union Mission. She had been born in London, England, and had grown up in Montreal. They married in 1887 and eventually had eleven children, six of whom survived childhood. They pioneered the North Honan (Henan) mission in 1888.
In 1900 the Goforths barely escaped the Boxers and returned to Canada. After their return to Honan in 1901, Jonathan Goforth felt increasingly restless. In 1904 and 1905 he was inspired by news of the great Welsh revival and read Finney's Lectures on Revivals. In 1907, circumstances brought him to witness firsthand the stirring Korean revival (When the Spirit's Fire Swept Korea [1943] represents his response). As he returned to China through Manchuria, congregations were so fascinated by his accounts that they invited him back in early 1908. During this extended visit there occurred the unprecedented "Manchurian revival," which transformed Goforth's life and ministry; from then on he was basically an evangelist and revivalist, not a settled missionary. He also became one of the best known of all China missionaries, admired by many, but disliked by some for his "emotionalism."
Goforth remained active well into the 1930s, especially in Manchuria; in 1931 the Goforths coauthored Miracle Lives of China. After his death in Toronto, Rosalind, a capable writer who had first published in 1920, wrote the popular Goforth of China (1937, with many reprints), and her own autobiography, Climbing: Memories of a Missionary's Wife (1940).