Aimee Semple McPherson was born Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy on October 9, 1890, near Ingersoll, Ontario, and became one of the most visible Pentecostal preachers of the twentieth century. After a dramatic conversion experience in her teens and an early widowhood, she settled in Los Angeles in the early 1920s, where her preaching drew crowds too large for any existing hall. Angelus Temple, dedicated in January 1923, seated more than five thousand and became the base of a ministry built on spectacle as much as scripture. McPherson staged illustrated sermons complete with costumes, sets and live animals, a style that drew open comparison to the film studios a few miles away.
Her most consequential innovation was not theatrical but technological. On February 6, 1924, Angelus Temple's own station, KFSG, went on the air, making McPherson the second woman granted a federal broadcast license and the first American woman to preach a sermon over the radio. Radio let her reach a congregation no building could seat, and the model she built, a ministry with its own station rather than borrowed airtime, anticipated the broadcast networks that later preachers such as Pat Robertson and the founders of Trinity Broadcasting Network would build in turn.
She organized her preaching around a vision of Christ in four roles, Savior, Baptizer, Healer and Coming King, which she called the Foursquare Gospel. The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, incorporated in December 1927 after the movement had grown to roughly a hundred congregations, remains an active Pentecostal denomination today.