The life of St John Maximovitch of Tobolsk
Death claimed him only four years later, in 1715, but in that brief span he did lasting work: building up Russia's earliest institutions of higher theological training and church publishing, and dispatching, under his own direction, the very first Orthodox mission sent into China.
Two centuries afterward, a child of that same Maximovitch line, baptized Michael, entered monastic life and deliberately took the name John in tribute to this forebear, going on to serve as Bishop of Shanghai and San Francisco. In a coincidence that struck everyone who knew the family's history, this later John found himself leading the exact Chinese mission field his own ancestor had opened generations before. Related by blood, sharing a single name, the two Johns Maximovitch remain, all the same, two separate saints, their lives set two hundred years apart.
