Latest news with #AimeeSempleMcPherson
9 News
17-05-2025
- General
- 9 News
America's most famous celebrity Christian disappears
1 of 14 Attribution: Los Angeles Public Library Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson was one of the most famous people in the US in the 1920s and 1930s. Known as "Sister Aimee", she pioneered the use of mass broadcast technologies such as radio to send her Pentecostal message to people around the country, and she drew tens of thousands of people to her faith healing events. So when she disappeared on May 18, 1926, it caused a huge commotion. McPherson vanished from Ocean Park Beach in Santa Monica, California, prompting fears she had drowned. However, a search was unable to find any sign of her. On June 23, her church, Angelus Temple, held a memorial service for her - only for her mother Mildred Kennedy to receive a phone call from officials in Arizona to tell her that McPherson was alive and in hospital.
New York Post
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
The wild story of America's pioneering ‘mega'-preacher
She was a blend of P.T. Barnum, the colorful showman credited with declaring, 'There's a sucker born every minute,' and the infamous flamboyant televangelist couple Tammy Faye and Jim Baker who built a scandal-riddled evangelical empire — all rolled into one. Back in the early years of the Roaring Twenties it was a charismatic lady evangelist by the name of Aimee Semple McPherson who ruled a circus-like path to heaven that enthralled audiences and worshippers alike. 8 Early 20th Century-preacher Aimee Semple McPherson during a worship service featuring her exuberant, ecclesiastic-meets-entertainment style. Getty Images Operating out of what was America's very first megachurch — the Angelus Temple, in Los Angeles, with more than 7,000 daily visitors — McPherson, by age 33, was a star who found her calling by dazzling followers with flamboyant sermons that described a rapturous state of love with God. A faith healer, too, McPherson's dramatic sermons included adult baptisms by immersion in water — with stage scenery borrowed from nearby Hollywood studios, and all of it backed by her brass band or 14-piece orchestra and a hundred-voice choir outfitted in heavenly white. And it all guaranteed that the collection plates would be spilling over at the conclusion of her services. To the devout, Aimee Semple McPherson was a modern-day saint, more recognizable than the pope. 8 McPherson's wild ways were compared to P.T. Barnum, the iconic showman of the same era. Getty Images 'Aimee sold herself as 'the just right option' — more comfortable than the thumpers who yelled about sin and hell, but also someone who embraced the pure fundamentals of Christian faith. She was 'Everybody's Sister,' ' writes journalist Claire Hoffman in her wild ride of a biography, 'Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). As Hoffman details, McPherson's 'critics called her the P.T. Barnum of Christianity. She used live camels, tigers, lambs and stately palm trees — whatever it took to bring the ancient world alive on her stage.' She was 'the Goldilocks alternative — not too hot, not too cold. The just-right message on Jesus,' Hoffman writes, as well as a queen of her realm, decked out in a white nurse's uniform topped with a blue cape emblazoned with a cross — appearing virtuous and godly. 8 The Angelus Temple, which could hold thousands and was a precursor to the massive 'mega'- temples seen across the nation today. Corbis via Getty Images Thousands gathered for the greatest show in town, proclaims the author, who observes that McPherson had repackaged Pentecostalism for a mainstream, white audience that depicted a loving personal relation with God. But the dark side of fame was about to beset McPherson. Writes the author, 'As her congregation and fortunes had grown, so too had ominous incidents: obsessed fans showing up in the middle of the night, a madwoman arrested for trying to murder her, and even a botched kidnapping plot.' On the sunny afternoon of May 18, 1926, 35-year-old Aimee decided to work on her sermons at the Ocean View Hotel, in the beach town of Venice. She changed into an emerald green bathing suit and headed down to the shore 'to take a little dip.' She began to swim further out and then disappeared in the waves of the blue Pacific. 8 The crowded Venice Beach location of McPherson's 'mega-congregation.' Corbis via Getty Images 'A squadron of police and U.S. Coast Guard searched the water from Venice to Topanga Canyon,' writes Hoffman, but the evangelist had vanished. That is until a month later when — miracle of miracles, and all hope lost — she suddenly resurfaced, not in the ocean, but walking 22 miles out of the desert in Mexico, claiming she had been kidnapped, drugged, tortured and threatened with sexual slavery. But Asa Keyes, then-the anti-corruption district attorney of Los Angeles, had a different account. He asserted that the famed evangelist had, in reality, stepped out of a car and walked a short distance over the Texas border. How she disappeared from the ocean was never known. Meanwhile, an eyewitness came forward claiming the godly McPherson had been shacked up with her lover, the married Kenneth Ormiston, the radio operator from her church, who quit his job shortly before she disappeared. 'Aimee defended every aspect of her life. She had battled for the world to believe her, selling herself as virtue made flesh,' writes Hoffman. 'She had to cast herself as a victim, blinking and wide-eyed, held hostage and at the mercy of dark forces.' 8 McPherson in the hospital accompanied by her husband, David. McPherpson underwent a bllod tranfusion amid an illness, but still remained committed to performing her services. Bettmann Archive The once fawning press called her 'a weaver of fantastic tales,' the 'Houdini of the Pulpit,' and described her followers as 'ill-educated bumpkins, the morons of LA.' As the author observed, 'Aimee was a wolf in sanctimonious sheep's clothing, adept at duping the masses with an artful smile and a great show.' She was investigated for criminal conspiracy to pervert, or obstruct justice. The investigation was later dropped, but the famed evangelist couldn't escape the continued harsh criticism by the press. One night after an appearance in Oakland, she returned to her hotel and overdosed on hypnotic sedatives. 8 McPherson celebrating her 25th year as an evangelist with a pageant called 'Cavalcade of Christianity,' in which 1,000 players participated. Bettmann Archive She was pronounced dead the following morning on Sept. 27, 1944 at age 53 and buried in Forest Lawn cemetery. Born in 1890, McPherson was first exposed to preaching and prayer when her mother joined the Salvation Army and took her young daughter to Salvationist meetings. Aimee loved playing church, sermonizing and singing hymns to her dolls. A Holy Ghost revival drew her into the Holy Rollers circle, shouting hallelujah while swaying in adoration of the Holy Spirit. She quit high school after falling in love with Robert James Semple, a department store clerk who left his job to preach and pray at revival meetings, and in 1908, the two married. Blissfully, they headed off to Europe and then Hong Kong to spread God's word, with Aimee pregnant. But malaria caught up with both, killing Robert and sending Aimee back to the US where she joined her mother ringing a bell up and down Broadway in New York for the Salvation Army. Down at the heels, Aimee agreed to marry Harold McPherson, an accountant who was hoping she'd be a happy homemaker. At age 23 in 1913, Aimee suffered multiple nervous breakdowns and a hysterectomy leaving her near death. It was then she would claim that she heard a voice telling her, 'Go! Do the work of an evangelist. Preach the Word.' She believed God was calling her and with her two children, Rolf and Roberta, she caught the midnight train for Canada where she began standing on a chair on the sidewalk with her hands raised toward Heaven calling for passersby to hear her preach. Now calling herself 'Sister' and wearing virginal white nursing uniforms, she began touring the East Coast preaching in revival tents and arenas. Aimee's mother, Minnie Kennedy, promoted her daughter's ministry with advertising and megaphones announcing her appearances, even dropping leaflets from aircraft — bringing in thousands into arenas that became littered with castoff canes, crutches and wheelchairs of those thought to have been healed by the laying on of Aimee's hands — and overflowing the collection plates. 8 Author Claire Hoffman. Davis Guggenheim According to the author, a vision had beckoned McPherson to Los Angeles in 1918 — and within five years, she had built her 'Million Dollar Temple' built with 'love offerings' received during years of itinerant tent revivals. So, what really happened to McPherson when she supposedly vanished into the ocean and was thought to have drowned but later turned up alive and well in a desert in Mexico? That mystery was never solved when she was alive and remains unsolved a century later today.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Contributor: Aimee Semple McPherson and the gospel of reinvention in L.A.
Los Angeles has always been a city that prefers reinvention to tradition, making it the ideal incubator for new religious movements. From the beginning, its distance from the centers of institutional power made it a place where identity could be fluid, beliefs unusual and performance, a currency. Self-transformation was, for many, the ultimate goal. 'It is a young city, crude, wildly ambitious, growing,' wrote the critic Louis Adamic in the 1930s, with scathing insight. 'It has halitosis and osmidrosis; and to kill the stench it gargles religious soul-wash and rubs holy toilet-water and scented talc between its toes.' Scholars of religion have marveled at the city's ability to create myriad new belief systems — from the Pentecostal revivals on Azusa Street in the early 1900s, to the Church of Scientology in the 1950s, to the wellness gospel of the 2000s and beyond. L.A. doesn't just reflect spiritual trends — it manufactures them and exports them to the rest of the world. Read more: From the Archives: Aimee Semple McPherson Dies Suddenly in Oakland Among L.A.'s self-realized religious innovators, Aimee Semple McPherson stands out. She is arguably our city's founding godmother of reinvention. When she arrived in Los Angeles on Dec. 21, 1918, she was looking to channel her connection to the divine into what today we might call a platform. The 'lady preacher' drove into town with only, as she would say time and again, '10 dollars and a tambourine.' In the backseat were her two young children, and riding shotgun was her mother, Minnie. Read more: Aimee Semple McPherson dazzled Angelenos with flamboyant sermons. Then she disappeared McPherson had spent the last few years living hand to mouth, holding tent revivals across America centered on her Pentecostal gospel, and building a following of believers who saw the 28-year-old woman as touched by heavenly gifts. As she followed the voice of God, her mother served as the ballast to her spirit-filled wanderings, procuring money and supplies, mapping the road ahead and building a substantial subscriber base for their fledgling magazine, 'The Bridal Call.' The two drove across the country's new highways without a man to accompany them, a fact that would only add to McPherson's mythology as a godly swashbuckling adventurer. As they cruised past orange groves and oil wells, Aimee was filled with dreams for the future — of sunshine, of easy living and of the multitudes who might come to see her preach. She would later write, 'I had the feeling that here I would meet my destiny.' Los Angeles in the 1920s was the perfect place for McPherson to build a following, fertile ground for radical ideas about how to connect God and self. It was not only one of the fastest-growing cities in the world but one of the fastest-growing cities in the history of the world. Unlike other American municipalities, L.A., it seemed, had erected itself through pure desire, a barren basin that stole enough water to reimagine itself as a paradise, whose city fathers marketed its sunny weather when they had little else to sell, cultivating its image as a healthy utopia, an alternative to grim, polluted industrialized East Coast cities. In the span of a few decades, it morphed from a violent outpost to one of the wealthiest places on the planet. To borrow a perfect analogy from historian Kevin Starr, Los Angeles was 'the Great Gatsby of American cities.' It would take McPherson just a few years to reach the heights of power in L.A. In 1923, she founded what is arguably America's first megachurch, the Angelus Temple, which still welcomes believers on Glendale Boulevard, across from Echo Park Lake. Next, she started one of the first Christian radio stations, in 1924. At Angelus Temple, where the main auditorium seated more than 5,000, multiple services and other programming went on all day, every day, and her dazzling approach of combining theatrical spectacle with the gospel made her the precursor of the 20th century's televangelists, a pioneer of Christian entertainment. McPherson presented salvation through her legendary 'illustrated sermons.' She rented costumes and scenery from nearby Hollywood studios and drew on popular culture and everyday events. She depicted life in Los Angeles as biblically prophesied and infused with meaning. Her critics called her the P.T. Barnum of Christianity. The temple had a 14-piece orchestra, a brass band and a hundred-voice choir, two-thirds female, all dressed in white. She used live camels, tigers, lambs, palm trees — whatever it took to bring biblical truth to life on her stage. The whole point was to dazzle and overwhelm. Aimee's sermons were soon considered the best show in town. She was one of the first in the modern era to understand that faith, fame and spectacle were not contradictions, but a heady brew for success. Read more: Letters to the Editor: 'Sister Aimee' and her Angelus Temple still leave their mark on L.A. But despite her incredible ambition and achievements, McPherson became enshrouded in scandal. At the height of her fame, in 1926, she walked into the ocean at Venice Beach and vanished. Tens of thousands gathered on the sand to pray for her, two people died in the search effort, and the city's headlines chronicled the tragedy like a soap opera. But 36 days later, Aimee wandered in from the deserts of Mexico to a backyard in Arizona telling an unbelievable story of being kidnapped. She returned to Los Angeles, where she was soon prosecuted for making the whole thing up — along with her mother, an alleged lover and a schizophrenic look-alike female grifter who had been sleeping at Aimee's parsonage. That fall, a judge listened to evidence on every aspect of McPherson's life — from her business practices to her romantic life to the size of her ankles. The case was ultimately dropped, the mystery never solved, but through it all, McPherson kept preaching and growing her audience. McPherson's life, gospel and showmanship burnished a sales pitch that remains at the center of L.A.'s allure. Even as the city navigates its recovery from devastating natural disasters, it is still a place where people arrive with hopes of revival, of materializing their dreams, of second chances and spiritual, physical, material and mental transformation. Now as then, seekers are manifesting their dreams: There's a better you available in the City of Angels. Claire Hoffman is the author of a just-published biography of Aimee Semple McPherson, 'Sister, Sinner.' If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
