Aimee Semple McPherson

Life and work

McPherson was raised in a Salvation Army household in Ontario and experienced conversion and Pentecostal Spirit baptism as a teenager under evangelist Robert Semple, whom she married and accompanied on a short-lived missionary trip to China, where he died of malaria and dysentery shortly after their arrival in 1910.

Returning to North America, McPherson began an itinerant healing and revival ministry that drew enormous crowds, eventually settling in Los Angeles, where in 1923 she opened the Angelus Temple, an architecturally striking, technologically innovative megachurch seating over 5,000 that used radio broadcasting (McPherson held one of the first licenses granted to a woman in America), elaborate illustrated sermons, and stagecraft to reach mass audiences.

In 1927 McPherson founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, organized around a "foursquare" gospel of Jesus as savior, baptizer, healer, and coming king; the denomination continued to grow into a significant global Pentecostal body long after her death.

McPherson's ministry was also marked by controversy, most sensationally a mysterious five-week disappearance in 1926 that she explained as a kidnapping but that produced conflicting evidence and intense public and legal scrutiny, along with a tumultuous personal life including multiple marriages and financial and legal disputes that made her a fixture of American tabloid coverage.

Questions and debates

Her 1926 disappearance and claimed kidnapping generated a highly publicized grand jury investigation amid allegations she had instead been in a romantic hideaway; charges were ultimately dropped, but the episode permanently colored her public reputation.

In their own words

"When God pours out his Spirit, there's bound to be results."attributed

Further reading

• Encyclopedia Britannica: Aimee Semple McPherson