Aimee Semple McPherson (1890—1944)

Country of Origin

Canada

Countries/Regions of Ministry

Global
United States

Traditions

Pentecostal

Ministries

National and denominational leader
Evangelist
Pastor
Church planter
Education institution founder

The twentieth-century evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson, was a woman ahead of her time. She founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, also known as the Foursquare Church, in an era when women could not vote and were expected to marry, have children, and leave professional religious pursuits to men. Devoted to evangelistic ministry, she crossed the United States with two young children. People were healed by the thousands when she prayed for them, but she took no credit for the healings, instead giving full credit to God. God had a plan for her life that did not take into account human limitations on doing things.

She was born Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy on October 9, 1890, near Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada, as the only child of James and Minnie Kennedy. She was reared in a Christian home but began to question the truths of the Bible during her teen years. When she was seventeen years old, still in high school, she attended a revival service by Pentecostal evangelist Robert Semple where she heard the message of repentance and had a born-again experience. She resisted the message at first, but the Holy Spirit continued to speak to her heart, convicting her of sin and the need for a Savior.

After a three-day struggle with doubt and uncertainty, Aimee prayed and asked the Lord to save her. As soon as she did so, the weight of sin was gone, and she was filled with amazing joy. When Aimee heard the evangelist speak also of the baptism with the Holy Spirit, she began to be consumed with the desire to experience the Pentecostal baptism. After a time of prayer and seeking the Lord, she was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in tongues. From that time forward, she had a love and compassion for souls and a longing to serve the Lord that remained with her.

Robert Semple had won Aimee’s heart and the two were married in August 1908, just shy of Aimee’s eighteenth birthday. Their individual desires to serve the Lord seemed to fit together perfectly. After ministering in Chicago and the Ingersoll area, the Semples began preparing to go to China as missionaries. In 1910, shortly before Aimee turned twenty, she and her husband set sail. It seemed to the young couple that they would have a lifetime together, preaching the Word of God and ministering to those for whom the Lord had so burdened their hearts. But that was not to be.

Robert and Aimee both contracted malaria within months of arriving in Hong Kong. Robert died only three months after their arrival, leaving Aimee as a penniless widow awaiting the imminent birth of their first child. When her daughter, Roberta Star Semple, was a month old, Aimee returned to the United States to face life as a single mother.

Aimee and Roberta lived in New York with Aimee’s mother, Minnie, and assisted her in raising money for the Salvation Army. It was there that Aimee met and married a Christian businessman named Harold McPherson. They had a son, Rolf Kennedy McPherson, and Aimee tried to settle down to a “normal” home life. However, not being obedient to her call to preach the gospel began to wear on her, and her physical health declined. She had two major surgeries within a two-year period, but became weaker and weaker. Eventually, she laid in a hospital, close to death, and the doctor called her mother to say her last goodbye. God asked Aimee one last time, “Now will you go?” She answered “yes” to God's call, and almost immediately she was healed. She never again questioned the call of the Lord to preach the gospel.

Sister McPherson and her husband began holding tent revivals on the East Coast of the United States with surprising success. Aimee prayed for people, and God honored her prayers. Thousands were healed. Thousands more became Christians. Life as traveling evangelists was difficult, however. Clothes were washed in streams, and many nights were spent fighting off mosquitoes as they slept in train depots, leaky tents, or their car, often with very little to eat. Eventually Harold decided that this was not the life he desired, and he left Aimee in the middle of a campaign in Key West, Florida.

Aimee continued to faithfully preach the gospel, and within a year, was holding revival campaigns throughout the United States. The largest tents could not contain the crowds who gathered to hear, so she rented the largest auditoriums. People stood in line and waited for hours for seats. People even hid in bathrooms and attics overnight so they could be at the next day’s services! In San Diego, the National Guard had to be brought in to control a crowd of more than 30,000.

Sister McPherson’s sermons were not “fire and brimstone” messages; instead, her sermons showed the face of a loving God with continually outstretched arms. Ahead of her time, she incorporated cutting-edge communications media of her day. She started her own magazine, The Bridal Call, in June 1917. While holding a revival meeting in San Francisco, in April 1922, she became the first woman to preach a sermon over the radio. Intrigued with the possibilities that this offered for ministry, she built radio station KFSG, and soon her gospel messages could be heard from Australia to the islands of Cape Verde. Eventually, she would produce “illustrated sermons” on Sunday evenings—stage productions that drew people who would never have entered a church. Prior to television, these presentations attracted huge crowds. Sister believed that the gospel was to be presented to everyone, at every opportunity, with all the means at her disposal.

She also broke down racial barriers everywhere she ministered. She spread the gospel to a Roma community after the chief and his wife were healed at a revival campaign in Denver. Sister McPherson established many Hispanic ministries in Los Angeles and established outreaches in German, Japanese, Czech, deaf, and other communities. With Aimee, there was no color, ethnic, or status separation line.

For several years she traveled and raised money to build an interdenominational center in Los Angeles. On January 1, 1923, when Sister was 32 years old, Angelus Temple was dedicated. The building held 5,300 people and was immediately filled to capacity at every service. The Temple became the spiritual home and base for evangelistic ministry that became the foundation of a global movement. Aimee summarized her message into four major points, which she called “the Foursquare Gospel”: Jesus as Savior, Jesus as Healer, Jesus as Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, and Jesus as Soon-Coming King. In 1923, she developed the Evangelistic and Missionary Training Institute to train ministers. Pastors were sent out, first within California and then to all parts of the country. Missionaries were sent to various mission fields and were supported by those who had caught Sister’s vision for reaching the world.

Sister McPherson also developed an extensive social ministry, feeding and clothing more than 1.5 million people during the Great Depression. In 1927, she opened a commissary to feed the impoverished and provide clothing and other necessities. Each person was given physical nourishment but also spiritual nourishment. Over the next years, during the depression, more than one and a half million people were fed and clothed through the Angelus Temple Commissary.

For the next decade, Aimee continued ministering and people came by the thousands to be touched by God. Civic leaders, politicians, actors and actresses, pastors from every denomination, as well as average citizens all attended her services. Her sermons were reprinted in hundreds of newspapers in Canada, the United States, and Mexico and were read by tens of millions of people. In one 150-day period she toured the country, traveled more than 15,000 miles, visited 46 cities, broadcast on 45 radio stations and delivered 336 sermons, sometimes as many as five in a single day. In 1933, she was seen by more than one out of every fifty people in the United States personally. When there were questions as to whether or not the miraculous healings people were claiming were real, the American Medical Association investigated. Their report stated that the work of Aimee Semple McPherson met with their approval in every way, and that the healings were "genuine, beneficial and wonderful."^[1]

In 1943, while ministering in Mexico, Aimee contracted a bacteria that began eroding the walls of her intestinal tract. She was under medical supervision when, in May 1944, her son Rolf announced that she seemed to be improving. Although she had been ill many times in the previous decade, including two occasions when her family was told to prepare for her funeral, she had always recuperated. This time it was not to be, and the tube running to her kidneys ruptured on September 27, 1944, after a revival service in Oakland, California. Because she regularly took sleeping pills, a medicinal interaction that night contributed to her passing. The coroner, however, stated that the sleeping tablet would not have had its disastrous effect if it had not been for the kidney ailment which allowed the medication to go directly into her system.

Aimee Semple McPherson left a global legacy of a passion for the disenfranchised, a contending for the power of the Spirit, and a desire to tell the gospel story in a compelling way that would transform individuals, cities, nations, and the world.

Foursquare Church Archives Department

Notes:

^[1]Daniel Epstein, Sister Aimee (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1993).

For Further Reading:

McPherson, Aimee Semple. This Is That. Foursquare Publications, 1923.
McPherson, Aimee Semple. In the Service of the King. Boni and Liveright, 1927.
McPherson, Aimee Semple. The Collected Sermons and Writings of Aimee Semple McPherson, vols. 1-5. Echo Park Evangelistic Association, 2015-2019.
Cox, Raymond L. The Foursquare Gospel. Foursquare Publications, 1969.