[5] 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.

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.

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.

[12][13] 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[14]), as well as his seat on the Chicago Board of Trade.

[1]: 105 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.

[16][17] [invalid, non-working citation links] In the face of arrests and potential mob violence, the Parhamites were forced to flee en masse from Illinois.

With Thomas Hezmalhalch, Lake founded the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa (AFM) in 1908 and carried on missionary work from 1908 to 1913.

[18]: 15  Due to the segregationist impulses of the AFM's white membership,[19] the majority of its African members eventually seceded, forming many different Zionist Christian sects.

He continued to found churches and "healing rooms" down the California coast and eventually to Houston, TX in 1927, before finally returning to Spokane in 1931.