A Famous Los Angeles Preacher Disappeared. This Book Tells Her Story

I first learned about Aimee Semple McPherson while in divinity school. “Sister Aimee,” as she was known to her adoring followers, was an early Pentecostal preacher, the founder of America’s first megachurch, and a pioneer of Christian mass media. She was also an unpredictable impresario who infuriated her critics with her instinct for spectacle. I remember thinking how odd it was that I had never heard of her — how did this important female religious pioneer not make it into my American history books? And then I promptly forgot about her, as so many others had. I went to work as a journalist, and part of that work included interviewing and writing about celebrities. Reporting on the very famous, often for this magazine, I soon saw common ground between religion and fame. There was something about the way these exceptional people described the unknowable to the rest of us and the ways in which they derived power and fame from that role as messenger — whether through music and art, or through spiritual experiences. In short, I was obsessed with what happens when we treat people as gods on earth.

I also saw up close how fame so often became a sickness, almost a madness. Many of the celebrities I wrote about seemed caged by their renown. I spent an evening alone with Amy Winehouse a few years before her death. As she puttered around her London flat, in an altered state, she earnestly tried to explain the pieces of her life to me and how she had ended up so far from the ambitious young jazz singer from North London whose otherworldly talent had propelled her to global fame. I wrote about others — Prince, Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber — and in all of these artists I saw a through line: The love from the throngs of fans seemed to separate them from the world, from reality, and even, at times, from themselves. I often had a sense that being famous was like being in a cage.  It turns out Aimee Semple McPherson was a prototype for so much of what bewilders us today — the dazzle of fame, and its dark side.

On a May afternoon in Los Angeles in 1926, one of the most powerful women in American history waded into the ocean and vanished. Before she walked down to the water’s edge that day, Aimee had been on a path to become one of the most important female religious figures the country had ever known. But on that sunny afternoon, a series of mysterious events unfolded, and Aimee’s destiny would change forever.

Aimee, at 35 years old, was often accused of hypocrisy, of using her beauty and sexual charisma to garner followers even as she railed against the libertine mores of the Jazz Age. She capitalized on the resentment and nostalgia of her congregants and satisfied their yearning for a simpler time. She embodied the old-time religion, in sappy, strident tones, dressed as a milkmaid or a nurse. Yet for all the lip service she gave to the past, she was on the vanguard of shaping what religion would look like in the next century. She created her own radio station, her own self-published monthly magazine, a national newsletter, and an army of evangelists who she educated at her bible college in order to spread her gospel around the world. And all the while, she preached a thrilling and impassioned doctrine of love and living faith to audiences of five to ten thousand or more at a time, every Sunday.

She drew these parishioners away from movie halls and rival churches with her signature illustrated sermons: She used her pulpit to bring the Biblical word of god to life, complete with an ever-changing cast and costumes. She wore boxing gloves to duke it out with “Kid Satan,” and dressed up as a motorcycle cop to preach on living too fast in the modern era. Long before televangelists and the billion-dollar industry of Christian broadcasting, there was Aimee giving people a modern Jesus they could experience as entertainment.

Aimee’s rise to fame had been fast. Just a dozen years earlier, she had been desperately trying to live as a housewife. She was widowed and on her second marriage, with two children by two different fathers. Domestic life did not suit the 26-year-old young woman who had once sailed to China to preach the word of God. Laid out in a hospital bed in Providence, Rhode Island, her body had an almost allergic reaction to the smallness of her life. What began with bouts of vomiting, internal bleeding, and heart tremors resulted in two nervous breakdowns, appendicitis, and, finally, a hysterectomy. In her memoirs, Aimee described the surgeries, which led to hemorrhaging, as brutal and barbaric. The doctors diagnosed her with “intense nervousness.” But on her deathbed, the voice of God spoke to her and she listened. She left her husband and her domestic life to become a lady evangelist.  And like many spiritual seekers, she soon found her way to the City of Angels. 

When it was opened on New Year’s Day 1923, the Angelus Temple was one of the largest churches in the world. The Temple buzzed with the thrills and demands of serving entertainment and spiritual solace to thousands of people a week. By the end of its first year, Aimee’s church was employing more than a hundred people, and daily visitors numbered more than seven thousand. The temple was a veritable city unto itself: 24 departments made up the corporate body, ranging from administration and finance to the on-staff electricians to the vast musical theater production department. There were several breakout rooms for prayer, including the “120 Room,” a place people could pray for the baptism of the Holy Spirit — and discreetly experience the gift of tongues.

As the main theater became more mainstream, this room became a more private place for more demonstrative worship. Nearby was a “Miracle Room,” where discarded canes, crutches, casts, and wheelchairs were displayed as evidence of divine healing. On the first floor, phone operators at two phone lines who took calls day and night from anyone in Southern California in need — supplying milk, blankets, and, of course, salvation. There was a publishing department that printed all of Aimee’s literature. Along with the monthly Bridal Call, a weekly newsletter was added — the Foursquare Crusader, with reprints of Aimee’s sermons, temple news, and various advertisements from neighborhood merchants. Aimee had three ministerial assistants and a board of seven elders, along with 21 deacons — 14 of them women.

Once Aimee built the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, she cut back on her national travel. She was asking local audiences to come to the temple every week, and in doing so she lost some of the allure of being a fleeting attraction. When she’d been traveling on the revival circuit, she had more than 60 sermons she’d written that she could perform for her ever-changing audience. But anchored in Los Angeles, she felt the pressure of producing new material.

She needed to create a steady stream of content — sermons, programs, classes, workshops — that would bring in new people and keep them coming back for more. Her innovation was the illustrated sermon — part spectacle, part feel-good homily — delivered every Sunday night. Mimicking the state-of-the-art technology and techniques of Hollywood, she delivered a gospel that felt relevant and immediate to her audience.

Aimee hired a stage manager, Thomas Eade, who had trained in vaudeville, to design her elaborate skits. They rented costumes and scenery from nearby Hollywood studios. Aimee drew on popular culture and everyday life, and wove current ideas and debate into sermons. She depicted life in Los Angeles as biblically prophesied and infused with meaning. Her critics called her the P. T. Barnum of Christianity. She used live camels, tigers, lambs, palm trees — whatever it took to bring the ancient world alive on her stage. Aimee’s sermons were soon considered the best show in town.

“Many objected — even some members of the Angelus Temple felt a little uneasy — to the novelty of the illustrated sermons every Sunday evening, sermons in which the lesson of the text is driven home through the eye as well as the ear,” she told Sunset magazine. “What matters the trail, so long as the goal is reached? If we can hold the wavering attention and reach the heart of just one sinner through the costumes, the scenery, and the properties of the illustrated sermon, the gain is worth all the efforts.”

Once Aimee had dazzled her audiences, she moved on to the altar call: “I want you to step out in the aisle nearest you. Then I want you to march right down the aisle to the altar, kneel right here, and say yes, ‘Yes, Lord! I need your help to live the good life!’ Come on everybody . . . Don’t one single person sit down. Don’t you dare! This may be your last warning.” Hundreds of people would pour into the aisles, weeping and shouting, the crowd heaving toward the pulpit as others fell to their knees and prayed

But Aimee wasn’t content with transforming the lives of the people who came to her pews — she wanted to reach out and touch the world with her words. Divine guidance told her that technology would help her spread the gospel. Inside a dark room in Oakland in April of 1922, Aimee faced a large microphone. A photographer stood by to take pictures, and a crowd of spectators had squeezed in to watch her: the first woman to preach over the “wireless telephone,” according to the announcer who introduced her. Aimee had been invited to give a guest sermon at the Bay Area’s popular new Rock Ridge radio station. Aimee was struck by the potential of the technology, how a single radio broadcast could reach significantly more souls than even a weeklong revival meeting. In the broadcasting room, as a crowd of technicians fiddled with the dials around her, Aimee was on edge. Could she be as effective in this tiny room with no audience to engage, no audience responding to her words?

But, as she had so many thousands of times, Aimee shifted her being out of the room and directed her focus toward the heavens, like an antenna. “After putting them all out except the operator, I felt more at ease,” she wrote. “That is, as much at ease as it is possible for one to feel facing that great horn and having only its dark, mysterious-looking depths for a visible audience . . . In a moment I found myself talking into that great receiver — talking somehow as I had seldom talked before. The room with its electrical apparatus was forgotten . . . and I prayed and preached and prayed again and did most everything but take up the collection.”

Always attuned to new technology, Aimee believed it was her duty to find the loudest amplifier to preach her message. Radio had a magic she instantly recognized: It compressed space and closed the gap between the presenter and the audience, which gave a disembodied connectivity to divine properties.

Long before the advent of television, films, or the Internet, radio made the remote immediate and the powerful intimate. With the flick of the dial, Aimee saw how she could be in people’s living rooms and kitchens, her voice in the ears of her listeners as she described how Scripture outlined a plan for modern existence and how the news of the day fulfilled biblical prophecy. For a woman who had succeeded by making herself so accessible, the radio was the perfect amplification tool. It allowed Aimee to connect directly on a new scale: Her message could reach the masses in an instant.

After Oakland, she began making appearances on the Los Angeles Times radio station and on stations in other cities she visited. Over the next year, Aimee began asking around about how she could start her own radio station and inquiring about the costs. Her mother, Minnie — who had worked for years as her business manager, nanny, and bodyguard — did the calculations on equipment, airtime, and programming, and they came up with a budget. Then they began to fundraise. Aimee used the language of magic to make her sales pitch, telling her followers that “these are the days of invention! The days when the impossible has become possible! Days more favorable than any that have ever been known for the preaching of the blessed Gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ! Now, the crowning blessing, the most golden opportunity, the most miraculous conveyance for the Message has come — the radio!”

Aimee’s vision of Christian media as a replacement for small-town Christian community was prescient, as was her programming. In addition to her Sunday morning sermons and baptismal services, she included Sunday school lessons, speeches on the state of Los Angeles by civic officials, lectures from Boy Scout leaders, and in-studio performances from a multiracial mix of musicians performing spiritual ballads, such as the frequent guests the Negro Swanee Jubilee Singers, or a sacred opera performed on the massive organ inside the Angelus Temple. Listeners could enjoy Children’s Hour, Minnie’s Sunday school program. Minnie became known simply as “Ma Kennedy” on the program and around the Temple. Most radically, Aimee was one of the first to convey faith healing — perhaps the most physical form of worship — through the radio. She asked listeners to kneel in their living rooms and touch the hard metal of their radio sets, using her voice and this new technology to create a sacred space for individuals as far as her words could carry across the airwaves. Aimee used the medium of transmitting sound to establish a new realm of spirituality. “As I lay my hands on this radio tonight, Lord Jesus, heal the sick,” she intoned nightly, her words hushed and reverential. “Bridge the gap between and lay your nail-pierced hand on the sick in radioland.”

More than any other preacher, Aimee emulated the commercial radio world. On the dial, Aimee’s sermons would coexist alongside studio serials such as The Green Hornet and Superman. In response, Aimee tried to take on these secular offerings with her own sacred versions of popular entertainment. The Temple even began producing its own versions of radio plays such as The Red Comet and The Adventures of Jim Trask — Lone Evangelist.

As the importance of the radio station within the organization expanded, Kenneth Ormiston, Aimee’s chief radio engineer, became one of the most central members of Aimee’s staff. He was the first person she saw every morning, when she delivered her Sunshine Hour radio sermon. She seemed to value his judgment more than others. Her mother watched as her daughter regularly stopped into Ormiston’s office at the end of the day after finishing her services. She was troubled when she heard Aimee ask Ormiston for notes on the Temple productions of her illustrated sermons. Minnie could not understand why her daughter would be asking this secular and flirtatious man for an opinion on God’s work.

In the Temple, where jubilant cries of “Hallelujah!” volleyed back and forth between the congregants endlessly, Ormiston was a bit of an outcast. A tall, bald man with large, piercing eyes and cupid lips, he dressed like a dandy. He wasn’t a member of the temple, or any church. He enjoyed working at KFSG but had no interest in the ideas that he helped broadcast across the West Coast. Reserved and urbane compared to the giddy go-getters who made up most of the administration, he isolated himself in his tower and spent most of his day inside the office, tinkering with his radio technology. Ormiston obsessed over sound and engineering, writing an occasional column on radio for the Los Angeles Times, and, briefly, published a small-circulation technical magazine called Radio Doings.

Despite large ears and a significant limp from a childhood bout with tuberculosis, Ormiston enjoyed a reputation as a ladies’ man. He had high cheekbones and an intense, unencumbered gaze. He was married to an Australian ice cream heiress, but rumors were that he got around. He saw the potential for Aimee and her ambition to use the radio to reach a massive audience, but he didn’t speak in the reverential tones that her followers used with “Sister.” He spoke as a peer, calling her “Mrs. McPherson” with a hint of flirtation. It was their “low-voiced remarks,” during choir practice, that began to make people in the temple uncomfortable. More and more, Sister was a being that was beyond human, a figure of reverence and worship who possessed supernatural powers. At the Angelus Temple, Sister was a saint, and her followers wanted her to stay that way.

In early 1920s Los Angeles, Angelus Temple became known as a place for first-class entertainment for the masses. The temple had a 14-piece orchestra, a brass band, and a hundred-voice choir, two-thirds female, all dressed in white. The whole point was to dazzle and overwhelm. Along with the rest of the city, Hollywood came to watch the legendary sermons — Charlie Chaplin was a visitor in those early days and Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon both attended as children.

By 1926, Aimee had manifested her dreams into a physical institution. She had built a megachurch, the first in what would become a long line of massive places of worship that would be erected over the course of the twentieth century — a remarkable achievement for a woman whose right to vote had been granted just two years earlier. Aimee had reconstituted the centuries-old tradition of large-scale tent revivals, once the stuff of rural country fields, into an urban physical monument.

As her congregation and fame grew, Aimee wielded incredible influence in a city that often operated as if it were still an outpost of the Wild West. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in the summer of 1920, ensuring women in every state the right to vote. The conversation about women’s rights, birth control, and the place of women in society was happening in homes and churches across the state, and around the country, as Aimee rose to power. But Aimee navigated her own course through these cultural flashpoints. Aimee was a spectacle in a city that was becoming an industry of spectacle. 

Despite the progressive moment, to be a woman in Los Angeles in the early 1920s was to choose between two identities: sister and sinner. Many women left the punitive existence of domestic servitude and escaped to the booming city by the sea. They chopped off their hair and smoked and danced and even, it seems, had a fair amount of premarital sex. The world of vice was alive and well, and as a young woman in Los Angeles, one could easily find oneself ensnared by the temptations of libidinous sex, opium, heroin, and crime.

In this heady world of fame, vice and virtue, Aimee plunged into the Pacific Ocean and vanished. Within days, 40,000 people would gather along the shoreline, holding vigil for their beloved Sister Aimee. Two people would die in the effort to find the evangelist. News of her death made headlines around the world. And then, 36 days later, she walked out of the desert of Mexico wearing a white dress and telling an unbelievable story that would change the course of her history — and ours.

Adapted from SISTER, SINNER: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson by Claire Hoffman. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Claire Hoffman. All rights reserved.