John (Maximovitch) of Tobolsk was a learned hierarch of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who, as Metropolitan of Tobolsk and All Siberia, devoted himself to the care of an immense and scattered flock and to the missionary enlightenment of the peoples of Siberia. He is commemorated on June 10 and is remembered as a wonderworker, a missionary, and a prolific spiritual writer. He should not be confused with his later kinsman and namesake, Saint John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco, a twentieth-century hierarch.
Born in 1651 at Nizhyn, then part of the Cossack Hetmanate, he came from a noble Cossack family and was, by tradition, the only one of seven sons to enter the service of the Church. He studied at the Kiev Academy, where he afterward taught, and was tonsured a monk of the Kiev Caves Lavra. He rose through monastic and episcopal office, serving as Archbishop of Chernigov, where he is credited with founding a collegium modeled on the Kiev academy and establishing a printing press for theological works, before being raised to the metropolitan cathedra of Tobolsk in 1711.
As metropolitan of the vast Siberian see, John gave himself to the spiritual care of his far-flung diocese and to mission. The Russian Orthodox mission to China is associated with his episcopate: he sent an archimandrite to Beijing in 1714 to lead what became the first Spiritual Mission of the Russian Orthodox Church there. He died in 1715 while at prayer and was glorified by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1916. His relics rest in Tobolsk.
