Guest post by Dr. W. Robert Godfrey, president and professor of Church History at Westminster Seminary in California.
In 1926 Aimee Semple McPherson was the most famous woman in America. She was nationally known as a Pentecostal preacher and healer. From small beginnings on a farm in Ontario, Canada, she went as a missionary to China with her husband Robert Semple. After his death, she returned to America and began to preach. Still when she arrived in Los Angeles in 1918, she was poor and little known. Yet within a few years, after tireless travel to preach and to heal, she had become famous and built her 5500-seat Angeles Temple as the base of her ministry. For a fine book on her career, see Edith Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson, Everybody’s Sister (1993).
At the height of her success, on May 18, 1926, Aimee went swimming in the Pacific Ocean, as she often did. She was due to speak at the Temple that evening and had gone with her secretary to the beach to swim, relax, and prepare for the evening. Her secretary saw her go into the water, but she then disappeared. After frantic searching, most people assumed that she had drowned.
Yet on June 23, 1926 she appeared in the small border town of Douglas, Arizona, telling the story of how she had been kidnapped and held in a house in the Mexican desert. She had at last escaped and walked for hours to reach Douglas.
Even before her reappearance, questions had been raised about this apparent drowning. Since there was a theatrical character to her church services, some wondered if this was all a publicity stunt. Others knew that she had been threatened for her opposition to crime in the city and thought that perhaps she had been kidnapped. Still others speculated about her friendship with the radio engineer at the Temple and wondered if she might have taken off with him. Even her mother, Minnie Kennedy, in charge of the Temple in her absence, seemed hesitant to believe that she had drowned, delaying the formal memorial service until June 20.
Aimee’s reappearance, while leading to great rejoicing among her followers, increased the questions. Her story of kidnapping could not be substantiated. Despite a careful search, no house was found in the desert. Her clothes and shoes did not seem to reflect hours of walking in the desert. She was eventually charged in Los Angeles with wasting police time, but the case against her collapsed. She never deviated from her story and her followers never doubted her.
Yet this episode profoundly affected her ministry. She had been something of a darling of the newspapers until June 1926, but now many regarded her as tarnished. Rumors circulated – and continue to be repeated today – that she had taken off with a man. No evidence supports that claim and the whereabouts of the radio engineer from the Temple during those weeks of her disappearance was soon accounted for. There is no hint of sexual impropriety from other times in her life.
So what happened? Neither the story of a kidnapping nor the story of a romance is supported by evidence. The disappearance remains the greatest mystery in American church history even now, ninety years after the event.
As we look back on this remarkable event, several points stand out.
First, someone else had to be involved in the disappearance, either friend or enemy. She had no clothes, or money, or car when she came out of the ocean. Yet no one ever claimed involvement in the matter. Second, her mother seemed very hesitant to believe that she had drowned. Third, she reappeared only three days after the memorial service for her. Fourth, she had been exhausted for months by the busy schedule of preaching and travel that she had been keeping.
We will probably never know what actually happened. My conjecture is this: She came out of the water and bumped into some friend to whom she recounted her exhaustion. The friend told her just to walk away from it all – and she did. For a month she relaxed incognito, but when her memorial service was held, she began to rethink her decision. Now rested, she decided to return. Perhaps her friend tried to talk her out of it, triggering the idea that she had been held against her will. In any case she did return and soon changed her life significantly. She built a get-away house for herself at Lake Elsinore where she could rest from time to time.
My conjecture fits the limited evidence, but may of course be completely wrong. Yet the reality of her exhaustion and of her finding a way later to cope with it is certainly true. It is also true that there is something of a pattern among Pentecostal leaders of working themselves into a state of exhaustion, withdrawing from their work for a time, and then returning renewed.
Pentecostalism – whatever else it is – is a religion of the extraordinary and the new. Its leaders at times find the pursuit of the exciting to be exhausting. (Interestingly, Charles Grandison Finney, the apostle of excitement, warned in his Lectures on Revival that excitement long continued would be destructive.) The disappearance of Aimee is perhaps a cautionary tale warning about the dangers of the exhausting promotion of the new. This anniversary is a good time for everyone to read and ponder Michael Horton’s book, Ordinary (2014).
