Foursquare with Aimee

Aimee Semple McPherson was Christendom's most flamboyant evangelist.

Through all the messy court cases that kept her name on U.S. front pages in the '20s and '30s,* Aimee's 35,000 followers remained fiercely loyal to their thrice-married leader. Even after her death in 1944, the church she founded, with its halfmoon-shaped, neo-Romanesque Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, continued to grow.

Soul-Winning Business. Last week some 3,000 of the faithful, from every state in the union and eight countries, gathered at her "jolly, gaudy" Temple for the 41st annual convention of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Membership, reported Church President Rolf McPherson, 50, Aimee's only son, has reached a record 218,800. The Angelus Temple has spawned more than 750 daughter churches and 1,300 mission stations in 27 countries; graduates from its three Bible colleges will carry the faith to eight more lands in 1964. The church now boasts gross assets of $41 million.

Its success seems largely due to the shrewd management of muzzy, homey Rolf McPherson, who looks, says one colleague, "like the man who comes onstage from the side and takes the third seat from the center." McPherson, who lives modestly in a middle-class Los Angeles suburb, has a Scotsman's knack for paring pennies and replenishing coffers. He himself attributes the church's survival to his mother's vision. "Soul winning is the one big business of the church," she declared; most of her convert-seeking followers tithe, while many give up weekends to build or repair their churches.

Denominational Identity. The Four-square Church, which ranks among the nation's most fundamentalist Christian bodies, pays considerably more attention to faith healing than theology. Its members adhere strictly to Aimee's fourfold teaching of Christ as saviour, healer, baptizer and coming king, supplement the Bible with a booklet of her teachings. Most of today's members never saw hypnotic Aimee in the flesh, but they teach a hagiographic account of her life, celebrate every Oct. 9, her birthday, as Founder's Day.

However, Aimee's church is building a denominational identity that is independent of the McPherson dynasty. Last week convention delegates for the first time elected all their own officers except for the president; in the past, church officials had always been appointed by Rolf. But that was one of the delegates' few gestures to conventional church practice. "The Lord wanted us to be different," Rolf exhorted the faithful. So, plainly, do they.

*Notably, her famed 1926 "kidnaping" case. A dogged district attorney argued that Aimee had not exactly been abducted, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

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