McPherson, Aimee Semple

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Aimee Semple McPherson

Born October 9, 1890 (Ingersoll, Canada)
Died September 27, 1944 (Oakland, California)

Evangelist and church founder

"I am not the healer. Jesus is the healer. I am only a little office girl who opens the door and says, ‘Come in.’"

The Roaring Twenties was a decade of major changes in the United States. A population shift had occurred, with more people now living in urban than rural areas. Amazing technological advances like automobiles, airplanes, and electrical appliances had brought convenience and a faster pace to daily life. These changes were exciting to some people, but others found them troubling and unsettling. Some turned to traditional religious belief for reassurance, leading to a surge in the popularity of evangelistic religious leaders (those who seek to convert others to their own faith). The most famous of these was Aimee Semple McPherson, a dynamic woman who attracted thousands of followers with her dramatic preaching and comforting message of salvation. At a time when few women took prominent roles in organized religion, McPherson founded her own church and overcame controversy to attract thousands of devoted followers.

A dynamic young religious leader

Aimee Semple McPherson was born Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy in Ontario, Canada. The daughter of farmer James Morgan Kennedy and Minnie Kennedy, a devotee of

the Salvation Army (a religious organization committed to helping the needy), McPherson was not a strong believer in Christianity until she was seventeen. That year, she attended a tent revival (a religious gathering held outdoors, under a tent roof) led by a Pentecostal minister. The Pentecostal religion features fundamentalist beliefs, including a literal interpretation of events in the Bible, as well as such practices as faith healing (by which illnesses and disabilities are cured through a strong belief in God) and so-called "speaking in tongues," when a person enters a kind of trance and begins speaking unknown words presumed to be from some biblical language.

In the summer of 1908 McPherson married the minister who had converted her, Robert Semple, and went out on the revivalist circuit with him. She soon found that she too had a gift for preaching and enjoyed being able to save souls (in other words, win them over to the Christian faith). In 1910 the couple traveled to China to do missionary work, which involved trying to persuade the local people there to become Christians. McPherson gave birth to a daughter, Roberta Star Semple, one month after her husband's death. Penniless, she returned to the United States and joined her mother in revivalist activities.

McPherson married Harold S. McPherson, a native of Rhode Island and a grocery clerk, in 1912, and their son Rolf Kennedy McPherson was born the next year. Soon McPherson found the call to preach too strong to resist, and she headed back on the road, leaving her husband behind. With her mother by her side, McPherson traveled up and down the East Coast in a car painted with religious slogans, such as "Jesus Is Coming—Get Ready" and "Where Will You Spend Eternity?"

McPherson gradually developed a flamboyant speaking style that was very effective, helping her to draw crowds as large as fifteen thousand in some cities. Her physical attractiveness and ability to persuade both seemed to add to her appeal. She had already attracted a considerable following when, in 1918, she and her mother traveled to Los Angeles, California. Here McPherson established her ministry, which she named the Four Square Gospel Church. She seemed perfectly suited to this city, in which so many lost-feeling residents had recently arrived from other places, and where her show-business techniques were readily accepted.

The Four Square Gospel Church

By 1923 McPherson was able to construct the huge, domed Angelus Temple, which seated more than five thousand worshippers and which was topped with an illuminated, rotating cross. Some came just to see and hear this colorful, increasingly

Billy Sunday: An Influential Evangelist

The stage for the dramatic, crowd-pleasing kind of preaching that made Aimee Semple McPherson popular was set by another revivalist preacher in the decade leading up to the Roaring Twenties. Billy Sunday won over converts in the 1910s with an entertaining style that several generations of fundamentalist leaders would imitate.

Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1862, William "Billy" Sunday was the son of a Civil War soldier who died a month after his birth. After a childhood marked by poverty, stays in orphanages, and little schooling, Sunday was on his own at the age of fourteen. He traveled around the state, supporting himself with odd jobs. Always interested in sports, Sunday started playing baseball with the local team in Marshalltown, Iowa, before being offered a position on a professional team, the Chicago Whitestockings. Sunday joined the team in 1883. After he converted to fundamentalist Christianity, Sunday began to bring his religious beliefs to the ballpark, urging his fellow players to give up drinking and other sinful practices.

In 1891 Sunday quit baseball to work for the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). Two years later he became an assistant to a Presbyterian evangelist named John Wilbur Chapman. Sunday's job was to set up the revival meetings at which Chapman preached. Sunday did some preaching himself, and soon after heading a revival that Chapman was unable to lead, set out on his own career as an evangelist preacher.

Ordained by the Chicago Presbytery in 1903, Sunday traveled around the country, speaking to larger and larger crowds. He became increasingly famous for his original, flamboyant style, which featured folksy, colorful language, often laced with baseball imagery and accompanied by athletic gestures. He was known for encouraging people at his services to "hit the sawdust trail," which meant that they should walk up the sawdust-covered aisle of his tabernacle (usually a temporary wooden structure) and accept Jesus Christ as their savior. Sunday also incorporated music into his services, which made them even more appealing.

The peak of Sunday's popularity came around the time of World War I. At massive rallies, he urged the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. He also denounced the liberal elements of society and mixed religious and patriotic terminology in support of the entrance of the United States into the war. Sunday's popularity declined in the 1920s, partly due to a scandal involving the large amounts of money he had made through his evangelist work. By the time of his death in 1935 he had led more than thirty campaigns and was said to have converted as many as three hundred thousand people to Christianity.

famous character, but many found themselves converted to her message and church. The foundation of the church included beliefs in Jesus Christ as the savior of humanity and in faith healing. In fact, the Temple housed a permanent display of canes, crutches, and braces that had been discarded by those McPherson was believed to have cured. According to Nathan Miller's New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America, however, McPherson modestly insisted that she was "not the healer. Jesus is the healer. I am only a little office girl who opens the door and says, 'Come in."'

McPherson employed music, vividly told Bible stories, costumes, and dramatic performances to deliver her message. For example, to illustrate the cost of breaking God's laws, she once rode down the Temple's front aisle on a motorcycle, dressed in a police officer's uniform.

Meanwhile, Minnie Kennedy continued her shrewd management of the business side of her daughter's ministry. In 1924 McPherson opened the first full-time religious radio station in the country, which greatly extended her reach. She also established the Lighthouse of International Evangelism, a Bible college and training school for ministry workers.

Although she was a talented publicist and powerful persuader, McPherson was also a stubborn and impulsive person. She ignored rumors that she was involved with her radio station's former engineer, a married Australian named Kenneth Ormiston. Then came an event that mystified the nation and made McPherson an even more controversial figure.

A mysterious "kidnapping"

In May 1926 McPherson went to a Los Angeles beach park to enjoy one of her favorite pastimes, swimming in the Pacific Ocean. She entered the surf and turned to wave to her secretary, who was waiting on the beach, but she never returned. A massive search was organized, with not only police, but also church members scouring the beaches for McPherson's body (two of the searchers were so upset by her disappearance that they killed themselves). It was assumed that she had drowned.

Intensive press coverage helped to sensationalize what was already a bizarre story. Then new rumors began to circulate: McPherson had been seen in the resort town of Carmel, located farther north on the Pacific coast, in the company of a man thought to be Ormiston (whose wife had by now left the country, claiming that her husband had had an affair with McPherson). Six weeks after McPherson's disappearance, her mother received a letter demanding five hundred thousand dollars in exchange for the evangelist's safe return. Otherwise, the note threatened, she would be sold into slavery in Mexico.

Just a few days later, though, McPherson called her mother from Arizona. She had escaped from her captors, she said, after being tied up in a Mexican shack. McPherson claimed to have staggered across the desert before she was finally found. On her return to Los Angeles, McPherson was greeted by thousands of ecstatic admirers. The police, however, were less convinced that her story was true. Many residents of Carmel reported that a couple resembling McPherson and Ormiston had stayed in a hotel there for ten days. McPherson was unable to produce any evidence to back up her story, and she was forced to testify before a grand jury on charges that included conspiracy to manufacture evidence.

Eventually, the charges were dropped (some believed that McPherson had paid someone a bribe to achieve this outcome), and meanwhile McPherson had become even more famous. She took advantage of her notoriety by setting out on a revival tour of the East Coast. She was mobbed by crowds anxious to see the celebrity that they had heard so much about. McPherson started dressing more stylishly and even cut her luxurious, long red hair in a short bob. The press followed her activities eagerly, especially when she appeared in a New York City nightclub managed by a notoriously shady woman named Tex Guinan. The club's customers cheered McPherson, who invited them to come and hear her preach.

Whenever journalists or anyone else asked McPherson about her kidnapping ordeal, she repeated the same sequence of events, always insisting "That's my story and I'm sticking with it." She continued her evangelistic work, even traveling to England, France, the Middle East, and Asia. Returning to Los Angeles, she continued to run her ministry. During the Great Depression (the period of economic downturn and suffering that lasted from the 1929 stock market crash until

approximately 1939), McPherson's church provided steady assistance to the needy, in the form of food and clothing.

As the 1930s continued, McPherson was plagued by a number of problems. She married David L. Hutton, a young choir member, in 1931, but they were divorced three years later. She was engaged in public disputes with several family members, and a total of fifty-five lawsuits were filed against her for various reasons. In addition, her church experienced some financial problems. These began to ease, however, in the 1940s, as membership was again increasing. In 1944 McPherson died of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. Leadership of her church, which was still in existence at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with more than seven hundred branches, fell to her son.