Aimee Semple McPherson

Aimee Kennedy grew up in Salford, Ontario, the daughter of a farmer and a mother active in the Salvation Army, comfortable in front of a crowd by her teens. At seventeen she fell for Robert Semple, a Pentecostal missionary preaching through her town, converted, and married him in 1908. They sailed for China as missionaries in 1910, and within months Robert died of malaria in Hong Kong, days after their daughter Roberta was born. Aimee brought the baby home, remarried in 1912 to accountant Harold McPherson, and had a son, but a severe illness in 1914 left her convinced she had been given an ultimatum to preach or die. In 1915 she left Harold, packed her mother and two children into a car, and started touring tent revivals.

McPherson moved her ministry to Los Angeles and in January 1923 opened Angelus Temple in Echo Park, a 5,300-seat auditorium that became the model for the modern megachurch. She staged "illustrated sermons" with full sets and costumes, ran healing services drawing tens of thousands, and in 1924 launched KFSG, only the third radio station licensed to a woman and one of the first religious broadcasters in the country. Through the Depression, Angelus Temple's relief operation fed an estimated 1.5 million people. In May 1926 she vanished from a Venice Beach swim and resurfaced five weeks later in Mexico claiming kidnapping. A grand jury investigated a rival theory that she had staged it, and prosecutors dropped all charges in January 1927 for insufficient evidence. She preached until her death in 1944, having built Foursquare into an international denomination.

The 1926 disappearance never stopped following her. Whichever version was true, the newspapers treated her as a suspect for the rest of her career, and the suspicion outlasted the dropped charges by decades. Her private life kept fraying in ways the ministry could not absorb: three marriages, two ended by death or divorce, and a third, to actor David Hutton in 1931, collapsing within three years amid more scandal. She suffered chronic exhaustion and what her contemporaries called breakdowns, and by the 1940s relied on barbiturates to sleep. On September 27, 1944, she was found dead in an Oakland hotel room, an autopsy attributing it to an accidental overdose of sleeping pills combined with kidney failure -- the faith healer who preached miraculous cures had none for the exhaustion that killed her.

Her son Rolf took over Foursquare after her death and steered it toward the respectability she had never fully achieved in her lifetime -- the denomination now counts more than eight million members worldwide, most of them outside the United States. She is widely credited, including by television evangelists who came after her, as the person who worked out how to fill a stadium-sized room and hold a national radio audience using the same showmanship Hollywood was inventing a few miles away. Novelists and screenwriters mined her for decades -- Sinclair Lewis's Sharon Falconer in Elmer Gantry draws visibly on her -- and Angelus Temple still stands in Echo Park, an active Foursquare congregation and a Los Angeles historic landmark.

Aimee Semple McPherson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Angelus Temple building
  5,300-seat Echo Park megachurch, still an active congregation 1923
• International Church of the Foursquare Gospel other
  Denomination she founded, now over eight million members worldwide 1923
• KFSG radio other
  Third U.S. radio license granted to a woman 1924
• Angelus Temple Commissary other
  Depression-era relief operation that fed an estimated 1.5 million people 1927

• 1908 aged ~18 Marries missionary Robert Semple after converting to Pentecostalism
• 1910 aged ~20 Robert Semple dies of malaria in Hong Kong days after their daughter's birth
• 1915 aged ~25 Leaves her second husband and begins touring tent revivals with her mother and children
• January 1, 1923 aged 32 Dedicates Angelus Temple in Echo Park, Los Angeles
• 1924 aged ~34 Launches radio station KFSG
• May 18, 1926 aged 35 Vanishes from Venice Beach, resurfaces five weeks later claiming kidnapping
• January 10, 1927 aged 36 Charges over the disappearance are dropped for insufficient evidence
• September 27, 1944 aged 53 Found dead in an Oakland hotel room from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills

• William J. Seymour 1870–1922
  Preacher who led the Azusa Street Revival, a foundational event in the global growth of Pentecostal Christianity. came out of the revival tradition of
• Billy Graham 1918–2018
  Evangelist whose mass crusades, media reach, and presidential relationships made him a defining figure in modern American Protestantism. predecessor in mass revivalism
• Mary Baker Eddy 1821–1910
  Founder of Christian Science and a major female religious leader and publisher. earlier woman who built a church and a publishing empire
• Jim Jones 1931–1978
  Peoples Temple founder whose 1978 Jonestown murder-suicide killed over nine hundred followers. the healing-revival tradition later curdled into