Aimee Semple McPherson and the Foursquare Gospel
A Canadian-born evangelist who pioneered Christian radio and built Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, Aimee Semple McPherson founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in 1923.
Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944) was born on a farm in Ontario. Widowed at 19 in China, she returned to North America, remarried, and by the early 1920s was the most famous female preacher in the United States — driving herself across the country in a "Gospel car" and filling civic auditoriums.
In 1923 she opened the 5,300-seat Angelus Temple in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, and in 1924 she launched KFSG — one of the first religious radio stations in the United States and only the third station of any kind in Los Angeles. Her four-point summary of the gospel (Jesus as Saviour, Baptiser in the Spirit, Healer, and Coming King) gave the movement its name: the Foursquare Gospel.
Today the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel reports more than 9 million members across 150+ countries. McPherson herself was a complicated public figure — survivor of a still-disputed 1926 disappearance, subject of repeated tabloid scandal — but her organisational legacy is one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in the world.