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Let's get into the story. And friends I know that God is my judge that I don't amount to anything in myself. I know I'm just a girl from the farm. But I know as sure as God ever called anyone, God called me and God put it on my soul to see the source for the gospel around the world. If you were living in the 1920s or 1930s, you would certainly know who Amy Semple McPherson was. She was one of the most famous Americans at the time in the sense that she had created a Christian ministry that seemed very relevant to the needs and desires and interests of Americans in this period. And so she became a celebrity on par with Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin. When I would give talks in the early 2000s, when there were more people still alive from the 1930s and 1940s, I almost never gave a talk in which some old person didn't come up to me and tell me when they had visited Los Angeles, they saw McPherson.
That was just something everybody did in this era. You wanted to see the Hollywood studios, you wanted to go to the beach, and you wanted to see Amy McPherson on her stage. McPherson grew up in Canada. She grew up on a rural farm. She joined the Salvation Army as a teenager, basically because her mother was working with the Salvation Army. And what that experience taught her was the importance of evangelism, of trying to make converts to Christianity. But it also taught her how to use innovative methods, how to take the Christian message to the public rather than wait for the public to come to you, to come to a traditional church.
And so from there, she decided to launch her own ministry in the 1910s. And so she moved to the United States. She traveled around the country in what she called her gospel car.
This was, of course, in the early days of automobile travel. And she would just hold revivals. She had a cheap tent she would set up as she went from city to city to city. And she would draw the attention of all kinds of Americans. And she was very good at using publicity to bring attention to her stories. She ultimately decided that it would make sense to settle down. And she had two small children.
Her first husband had passed away, the father of her children. And so she decided that rather than keep traveling, that she would build essentially a permanent revival tabernacle, a place where people could come to her, experience her four-square gospel, and then take it back out to the rest of the country. And she settled on Los Angeles in the 1920s. And Los Angeles in that period was exploding.
And so McPherson recognized that Los Angeles was becoming a tourist destination. And so she essentially made her church part of that. She had pretty humble plans of building a large revival tent, basically some kind of inexpensive wooden tabernacle.
Instead, she built a huge 5,000-seat theater. It had three tiers. It was basically filled with opera chairs rather than pews. It had a huge orchestra pit.
It had a beautiful stage. And it was the state-of-the-art church that really was the perfect place for her to preach her evangelistic message. And what it symbolized was a new era in church building, the sense that churches were not going to be these kind of old, boring, puritanical, functionary, but it was going to be a place of comfort, a little bit lavish, where people could come and be entertained. And so it really set the foundation for the megachurch movement. McPherson also recognized very early on the power of radio. And so she built her own radio station and immediately took her four-square gospel onto the air.
And so it really drew even larger audiences from all over the western United States. So the gospel that McPherson preached drew on earlier revivalist ideas. And she called it the four-square gospel. And what she emphasized was Jesus as savior.
So that was the first of the four squares. The second was that he was the healer. And this had to do with the kind of Pentecostal emphasis on the idea that God could intervene in your life today and could bring you healing, physical, emotional, spiritual. So McPherson believed that she could lay hands on people and they might be healed. The third piece of the four-square gospel was that Christ was the baptizer and the Holy Spirit.
And the idea was that you would have a secondary experience after salvation, this kind of moment of sanctification, where you would be purified by the Holy Spirit, freed from sin, and live a more godly, holy life. And then the final part of it that she emphasized was Jesus as the soon-coming king. She really emphasized the imminent apocalypse. She believed she was living in the last days, that Jesus was coming back soon, that the rise of the Antichrist was imminent, and that the world was careening towards this global battle of Armageddon and that things were going to get really bad before they got better, before Jesus returned to establish his kingdom on earth. And so for her, she believed that the U.S. had special divine origins, and so her sermons tended to be very patriotic, very pro-American, and this is true of many immigrants, right?
She was a Canadian, so she'd come to the United States and really embrace the United States. And so she blended with her message the sense that the United States was the new chosen land, was the new Israel, and was a place that God had destined for this special work in his last days. What made her services so attractive is what she did on every Sunday night. She, rather than deliver a traditional service behind a pulpit, she developed what she called illustrated sermons, and she drew on the talents of Hollywood to do this. She recruited producers, actors, lighting artists, prop designers, set designers, and she would have these huge elaborate productions on Sunday nights, these stories, these plays, and she often took the starring role, of course, in which she embodied different biblical stories, different messages of the Christian gospel.
She was very explicit about this, that you needed to do something to compete with Hollywood, with movies, with radio, and so the way to do that was to essentially take the tools of Tinseltown and make them your own. And one of my favorites was called the Heavenly Aeroplane. She had to get up to San Francisco for a radio exposition, and she didn't have a lot of time to get up there and get back, and so she chartered a plane. And this was in the 1920s, early 1920s, in the early days of flying.
So it was a biplane, one of these planes that you think of, you know, World War II fighter planes, which is two seats. So it's her and the pilot. The pilot didn't see a giant pothole in the runway, drove the wheel right into it, and essentially crashed the landing gear. So the plane did a nosedive, the tail flipped up into the air, and McPherson went tumbling out of the plane. And it was this really dangerous, kind of catastrophic runway plane crash. Luckily, nobody was hurt.
McPherson walked away unscathed. What it did was it got a bunch of national media attention because this was a famous American in a plane accident. And so she used that attention like she always used media attention to craft an illustrated sermon. So when parishioners came into Angelus Temple that next Sunday night, what they saw on the stage was a miniature airplane, actually two miniature airplanes, and the stage was decorated as an airfield. And she had the planes connected to wires, and one she said was piloted by the devil, the other one was piloted by Jesus, and the planes would fly over the congregation, fly around the whole church, and she would encourage parishioners to make a choice. Did they want to be on the devil's plane or did they want to be on Jesus's plane? And of course, at the end of her message, the devil's plane crashed into this heap, this pile on the church stage, while Jesus's plane flew up to the heavenly city, to this little model of heaven that she had built that was suspended from the top of the church. And it was these kinds of elaborate sermons with props, with costumes, with extras, with actors, with innovative technology. The idea that these planes are going to be flying all over church is what was so exciting and so enticing about her. And you've been listening to Dr. Matthew Sutton tell the story of Aimee Semple McPherson, and my goodness, what a story indeed, taking church and the gospel to another level, to a new level, and to compete in the end with high entertainment from Los Angeles by building the first mega church in Los Angeles.
When we come back, more of Aimee Semple McPherson's story, here on Our American Stories. Today's podcast is brought to you by Ferguson Home. Whether you're a homeowner working on a remodel or a pro managing multiple projects, Ferguson Home is where great ideas become stunning spaces. My wife and I know firsthand, because Ferguson Home was by our side when we built our beautiful house. All of our indoor and outdoor kitchen appliances, most of our kitchen and bedding, and most of our kitchen and bath room hardware came from Ferguson Home. They have the best selection of kitchen, bath, and lighting products, all of which you can find online, or you can visit a local Ferguson Home showroom like we did and get one-on-one support from their amazing consultants who are there for us with their expert advice and support. They'll be there for you too.
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But when she settled into Los Angeles, as her status increased, as her audience grew, as she moved up into the middle class, she downplayed some of the more exotic and esoteric dimensions of Pentecostalism. And so a typical service in Angelus Temple would not have people speaking in tongues, would not have prayer for divine healing, certainly wouldn't have people dancing in the aisles. All those things still happened in her congregation, but they usually happen in rooms off to the side of the main sanctuary. So people could go into these separate rooms, pray for healing, pray for the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
If they spoke in tongues, they spoke in tongues. But McPherson didn't want those kinds of things happening during services, and she certainly didn't want them being captured by the radio microphones and broadcast out to much of the rest of the country where they might sound kind of weird. In some ways, though, at the end of her career, she really re-embraced that heritage. In the late 30s and 1940s, she returned to her Pentecostal roots. That's also the moment when she really made a clear effort to integrate her church, racially integrate her church. She brought some leading black Pentecostals to speak at her church, and she began to champion civil rights in ways that she never did in the 1920s. That for much of her career in becoming middle class and respectable, that also meant embracing Jim Crow segregation and really setting aside black civil rights. But at the end of her career, I think she recognized the sin of that choice and began to move away from it and to focus more on trying to reintegrate the Pentecostal movement that had some integrative origins but had really lost it by the 1910s and 1920s.
McPherson was in the 1920s one of the most famous Americans in the country. She was profiled in all of the major magazines. She was regularly in the major newspapers.
But things took a turn in 1926. At that point, she vanished. She disappeared. Her family and her church leaders presumed that she had died. She had gone for a swim down in Venice Beach in Southern California. She was a young woman.
She had gone for a swim down in Venice Beach in Southern California and never came back. A little over a month later, though, she stumbled across the Mexican border into Arizona with this crazy story of having been kidnapped, taken down to Mexico, and held for ransom. And in fact, there were ransom notes that arrived at her church, at her Angelus Temple organization. But there were all kinds of crank notes that they were receiving.
So it's hard to know what was legitimate and what was not. Her story, which she stuck to to the end of her life, was that she had been kidnapped and that the kidnappers wanted to sell her back as a way to raise money. The other reason she believed she had been kidnapped, a claim she had been kidnapped, was that she had taken on the Los Angeles criminal underground. She was really trying to stop the trade, especially in illegal alcoholism. Alcohol. This was in the era of prohibition.
And also trying to take on the dance clubs. She was taking a stand for this kind of moral integrity in that those who were complicit in these underground businesses wanted to stop her. So that was her story.
At the same time, though, enterprising journalists began asking questions and began pursuing this story. And what they discovered was that at the same time that McPherson had disappeared, her radio engineer, a guy named Kenneth Ormiston, had also disappeared. He had also vanished, just walked away from his job and was gone. And what journalists discovered was that while McPherson was gone, he was up in Carmel, a beautiful beach town in Northern California, with a heavily disguised woman.
So he checked into a hotel. He was there with a woman. And it was never clear who this woman was. And after the fact, McPherson's mother acknowledged that there had been rumors in the church that Amy was having an affair with this Ormiston before the kidnapping.
There were worries and there were concerns that perhaps they had grown too close. And the radio engineer was actually married at the time. When McPherson returned, when these stories broke, the local district attorney launched an investigation, first to determine whether or not there could be charges against these alleged kidnappers. And then ultimately he determined that she had lied.
He took his evidence before a grand jury and the grand jury issued criminal indictments against McPherson. And so there was a subsequent major trial that dragged on and on. And it was covered in the national news. This was a huge story. All the major journalists in the nation were covering it. It was in the New York Times, in the LA Times, of course, in the New Yorker, in all of the major magazines. And so Americans were obsessed over this trial and trying to determine whether or not McPherson had had an affair.
The district attorney ultimately decided to drop the case, drop the charges. He was probably pressured into doing that by William Randolph Hearst, the major media tycoon of the 1920s and 1930s. It may be that McPherson blackmailed Hearst. Hearst at the time was having an affair with a Hollywood actor.
McPherson found out about this and she communicated to him that she was going to use the power of her radio station to embarrass him for his moral foibles if he was going to continue to try to embarrass her through his use of the media. But we don't ultimately know what happened in that month that McPherson was gone. Certainly the circumstantial evidence makes it appear that she was having an affair. There was never any conclusive proof to demonstrate that she was the woman with Kenneth Ormiston and Carmel. And there was never any conclusive proof to demonstrate that she was kidnapped. Kidnappers were never found.
There was never anybody who acknowledged that they had been involved. So to this day, we don't really know. It's one of the great unsolved mysteries in American history. After the trial, McPherson took a hit in publicity. A lot of people were very skeptical about her, very cynical of her. And so she spent some time sort of regrouping. She made a few additional, what I think she would acknowledge were poor choices after that. She rushed into another marriage with a guy who was really kind of a disaster for her ministry. He was a heavy drinker, probably a womanizer, probably didn't care that much about her ministry. At the same time, McPherson had a falling out with her mother, who had been her right-hand person in the ministry. McPherson had a falling out with her at that point adult daughter. So there was just one scandal after another.
There were rumors of financial impropriety. McPherson really embraced the Hollywood lifestyle. She started dressing in the latest Hollywood fashions, wearing expensive jewelry. She bought a really nice house in this resort town outside of Southern California. She was driving really nice cars. And so it really hurt her reputation. But in the mid-1930s, she sort of had this moment of redemption where she wanted to return to her roots. And then at that point, her ministry began to really rebuild once again. So by the 1940s, she had really rebuilt her ministry. Churches related to her ministry were expanding all over the country.
So it really established the foundations for a denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which is still a major, major American denomination today with a huge missionary apparatus that has churches all over the world. McPherson died in 1944 of an overdose of barbiturates. There were rumors at the time that it might have been a suicide.
It probably was not. These were heavy sleeping pills she would take when she would preach her revival services. She would get so up. She really needed drugs to come back down to be able to get any kind of relaxation. And this particular drug, you could take it and forget that you had taken it.
And so it's likely that it was an accidental overdose. But it ended her life in tragedy, which was much of how she lived, that it was the story, this American dream of becoming one of the nation's most innovative preachers and revivalists, but also was one that led her own life in deep, dark places, real, real unsatisfactory, real unhappiness within her career. She just had this ability to make people feel warm and seen and encouraged and heard. And people really resonated with her. She was also very charismatic, but also very humble, that she, because she came from the farm, because she was relatively poorly educated, she made herself very relatable to average Americans. She was never condescending.
She never talked down to them. She was encouraged them and met them where she was at. And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Megan Pidcock and a terrific job on the storytelling by Matthew Sutton.
He's the author of the book, Amy Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Oh, what a story we heard. She develops a real penchant for spreading the gospel, develops innovative techniques to do it, a real showwoman in the end, and it ends up building America's first megachurch. There's scandal.
There are problems, as almost always happens in these regards. And she dies in the end of a barbiturate overdose in 1944. But what a life she led in the 1920s, as famous as Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin. And in the end, her work through the use of the most modern technology known to man radio spread the gospel to millions.
The story of Amy Semple McPherson here on Our American Stories. Are you still quoting 30-year-old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now. It pays to discover.
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