McPherson, Aimee Semple

(1890–1944)

   Missionary and Sect Founder.

   McPherson was born Aimee Kennedy in Canada. She experienced an evangelical conversion through the preaching of Robert J. Semple and she subsequently married him. Together they went as missionaries to China where he swiftly died of malaria. On her return with her new baby to Canada, she married Harold McPherson, whom she eventually divorced. McPherson was arguably the most famous evangelist of her day. She preached throughout the United States and by 1922 she had built the huge Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, California. There she taught her ‘four-square gospel’ of Jesus Christ, the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the expectation of the Second Coming. In 1922 she preached what was probably the first radio sermon and in 1927 her chuch became formally known as the International Church of the Four-Square Gospel. Today it is one of the best known of the Pentecostalist Churches; it has over seven hundred congregations and more than a hundred thousand members. After an eventful life (on one occasion she claimed to have been kidnapped), McPherson died of a heart attack after a visit to the Holy Land.

   K. Kendrick, The Promise Fulfilled: A History of the Modern Pentecostalist Movement (1961);

   A.S. McPherson, This is That: Personal Experiences: Sermons and Writings (1923);

   J.T. Nichol, Pentecostalism (1966).