Born on October 9, 1890, near Ingersoll, Ontario, Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy was reared by her mother in the work of the Salvation Army. She was educated in public schools. In August 1908 she was married to a Pentecostal evangelist, Robert J. Semple, under whose influence she had converted to that sect (she was ordained in it in 1909) and with whom she did missionary work in China. After his death in Hong Kong in 1910 she returned to the United States. In February 1912, while working with her mother and the Salvation Army in New York City, she married Harold S. McPherson, with whom she settled in Providence, Rhode Island.
In 1915 McPherson decided to devote her life to preaching and healing. Her first preaching occurred at Mount Forest, Ontario, in August 1915, and the next summer she began a career as an itinerant evangelist. From the beginning she worked in spiritual healing and encouraged speaking in tongues and other common attributes of fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christianity. In 1917 she began writing and publishing Bridal Call. Under her mother╒s management (her husband left her in 1918 and obtained a divorce in 1921) she traveled through the United States and to England, Canada, Australia, and other countries. From 1918 she made her headquarters in Los Angeles. Her personal appeal was such that her revivals attracted thousands, from the well known to the unlettered. In April 1921 she began building her Angelus Temple in Los Angeles.
In January 1923 it was dedicated as the ╥Church of the Foursquare Gospel,╙ a name deriving from her vision of a four-faced creature she equated with Ezekiel╒s similar vision and interpreted as typifying Christ╒s fourfold role as Savior, Baptizer, Healer, and Coming King. Based on tenets of hope and salvation for the needy, her Foursquare Gospel appealed especially to migrant Southerners and Midwesterners who found themselves frustrated by the complexities of life in urban Southern California. In 1927 she incorporated the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.
A born showman, McPherson dazzled her audiences with robed choirs, costumed pageantry, an orchestra, and her own white-robed, blue-caped figure. She preached every night at the temple, and Sunday services at the temple were attended by thousands of worshipers, who sat spellbound throughout extravaganzas that included patriotic and quasi-religious music played by a 50-piece band, the breathtaking entrance of Sister Aimee, prayers, and singing, all climaxed by a dramatic sermon. She based much of the appeal of her movement on faith healing, adult baptism by immersion, and a pervading aura of optimism and spectacle. The temple radio station broadcast her services, and she published weekly and monthly magazines and operated numerous other enterprises. She compiled a book of sermons, This Is That, 1923, and wrote In the Service of the King, 1927, and Give Me My Own God, 1936. She frequently made newspaper headlines, most notably in 1926, when she disappeared for several weeks (she claimed to have been kidnapped) and she was accused of a number of financial improprieties, but none was proved and none detracted from her appeal to her loyal following. During the 1930s she was dogged by numerous lawsuits╤at one time 45 assorted legal actions were pending╤and by disagreements with her family.
By 1944 McPherson╒s Foursquare Gospel movement had grown to include over 400 branches in the United States and Canada and nearly 200 missions abroad, with membership numbering some 22,000. Her Bible College, founded in 1923 and from 1926 housed in the Lighthouse of International Foursquare Evangelism next to the Angelus Temple, had graduated over 3000 evangelists and missionaries. She died on September 27, 1944, in Oakland, California, from an overdose of sleeping pills that was declared accidental. Her son Rolf McPherson continued the movement.
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