Aimee Semple McPherson

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.

On May 18, 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson went missing from Ocean Park Beach in Santa Monica while swimming. For more than a month her Angelus Temple congregation held prayer vigils, and one distraught follower drowned searching for her body. On June 23, 1926, McPherson reappeared in Douglas, Arizona, with an account of having been chloroformed, shoved into a car and held in a shack in Mexico before escaping on foot across the desert.

Los Angeles prosecutors did not accept the account. Investigators advanced a competing theory: that McPherson had spent the missing weeks with Kenneth Ormiston, a married radio engineer formerly employed at KFSG, and had staged the disappearance to cover the absence. Prosecutors pursued charges against McPherson, her mother and others for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to manufacture false evidence, built around witness testimony placing a woman answering her description at a rented cottage with Ormiston. On January 10, 1927, a grand jury dropped all charges for insufficient evidence, a legal outcome that resolved the case without resolving the underlying question.

The disappearance became inseparable from her public image, generating more newspaper coverage than any sermon she preached and setting a template, an evangelist's private life becoming as newsworthy as the ministry itself, that later broadcast preachers would repeat under far less ambiguous circumstances. She died in Oakland, California, on September 27, 1944, from an overdose of Seconal sleeping pills, ruled an accident by most biographers though the exact circumstances were never fully settled.