AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON

Aimee Semple McPherson was a legendary Pentecostal evangelist. She was born in Canada in 1890 as Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy, and in 1907, she attended a revival meeting that was conducted by Robert James Semple, and she not only was taken by religion, but also by the minister, and the pair married, and devoted their lives to religion. They went to China as missionaries two years later, and both caught malaria. Robert died, but she survived and gave birth to a daughter, becoming a 19 year-old mother and widow. She joined her mother, who worked for the Salvation Army, and she met Harold Stewart McPherson, an accountant. They married in 1912, and had a son the following year. She said later she consistently heard the voice of God urging her to preach, and finally, she gave in to the voice and left her husband, taking both children, and she began preaching, and her husband soon joined her in her work. However, he never fully embraced it, and he left her a few years later and they divorced. She became a legendary evangelist, speaking in tongues and healing the sick. She held tent revivals throughout the United States and Canada. Her mother managed her growing business. In 1917, she started a magazine about women's role in religion. In 1918, she moved to Los Angeles, where she drew gigantic crowds. Her ministry continued to grow, and she was the first evangelist to embrace radio, and she had a huge following throughout the late 1910s and early 1920s. In 1926, she was involved in a very strange story. She disappeared for five weeks to Mexico, and when she reappeared, she said she had been kidnapped, and there were rumors that it was a hoax. In 1926, she was swimming at Venice Beach, and she was thought to have drowned, and later she showed up claiming that a couple had kidnapped her. This is just a small portion of her most remarkable life! All of today's "televangelists" have careers using the techniques pioneered by Miss McPherson. Future star Anthony Quinn traveled with the McPherson entourage in the late 1920s as translator, band member and novice preacher. Sinclair Lewis used a fictionalized portion of her life in his novel "Elmer Gantry". You can read much more about her on her Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_Semple_McPherson. She passed away in 1944, at the age of 53, having led one of the most remarkable lives ever!