Sister Aimee and the Birth of the Megachurch

This episode is brought to you by the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is magical at night.

When the sun sets, Las Vegas transforms.

And at the heart of it all is the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, a luxury resort destination where bold experiences unfold.

Sip a martini inside the chandelier, discover hidden speakeasies, striking art, and unforgettable views of the Bellagio fountains and the Las Vegas skyline from your terrace suite.

From restaurants to cocktail lounges and high-energy nightlife, every moment invites indulgence.

It's not just a hotel stay.

It's an only in Vegas experience.

Book your stay now at thecosmopolitanlasvegas.com.

Huge savings on Dell AI PCs with Intel Core Ultra processors are here, and they are newly designed to help you do more faster.

They can generate code, edit images, multitask without lag, draft emails, summarize documents, create live translations, and even extend your battery life.

That's the power of Dell AI with Intel Inside.

Upgrade today by visiting dell.com slash deals.

This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

In the artsy neighborhood of Echo Park in Los Angeles, right across the street from Echo Park Lake, you'll find a building that begs to be noticed.

It sits against the backdrop of coffee shops, tattoo parlors, and tattoo parlor slash coffee shops.

It's a colossal white structure that looks like an arena laced with archways.

Its defining feature is an enormous concrete dome perched overhead.

The building itself is a blend of classical and modern design elements and has been described as, quote, half Roman Colosseum, half Parisian opera house.

I mean, some people have described it that way, but if you ask me, I think it looks more like a concrete flying saucer landed on top of the Rose Bowl Stadium.

That's reporter, actor, and frequent contributor, Gillian Jacobs.

One of my personal nerdier hobbies is driving around Los Angeles and looking up the history of buildings.

It's what I do to relax.

So of course, the first time I went to Echo Park Lake, I homed in on that building across the street.

I had to know what it was.

And luckily for me, there are tours available.

The dome was also the largest freestanding dome of that size and shape, at least in the northern hemisphere, if not the world at the time.

Turns out this place is a Pentecostal church called the Angeles Temple.

Dan Scott is head docent of the Temple's Heritage Museum.

Seated 5,300 people.

It was also uniquely built.

It's completely fireproof, so that's why it's never burned down all these years.

The temple was designed by the church's founder, Sister Amy Semple McPherson.

Her voice was actually playing through the museum's speakers throughout the tour.

What you hear in the background are live church services that were broadcast live from the temple.

I'm going to turn her off for a while.

Sometimes I feel like I'm competing with her.

As it happens, the Angelus Temple isn't just an architectural anomaly in Echo Park.

It's regarded as the very first megachurch ever built in the United States.

The temple was opened in 1923, which predates the modern modern megachurch movement by about a half a century.

Today, when millions of Americans enter contemporary megachurches with all of their accompanying theatrical accoutrements, they unknowingly enter spaces pioneered by Amy Semple McPherson.

So much about what you see in megachurches today and in, you know, Christian broadcasting and entertainment, Christian fiction, all of that is, you know, these things that she started.

This is Claire Hoffman, author of Sister sinner the miraculous life and mysterious disappearance of amy semple mcpherson as you can imagine from the title of claire's book there is a lot more to mcpherson's story than just being a preacher mcpherson transformed worship and at one point was arguably one of the most famous women in america she built one of the largest churches in the country and filled it with thousands of people a week she also stirred up one of the most salacious public dramas of the early 20th century you know know, she was making some

decisions and mistakes that were pretty questionable themselves.

And so here's a really complicated person who was incredible and powerful and also made some really weird choices.

Before she added the simple and McPherson, Sister Amy was born Amy Kennedy in 1890.

Here she is talking about growing up in rural Canada.

It was some distance away on a Canadian farm in Ontario that I was born and brought up as a farmer's daughter.

I was the only boy on the farm, the only girl on the farm.

By even her own account, Amy was an overachiever during her schoolgirl years.

In her own writings, she describes herself as top of her class, a natural leader, debater, elocutionist, and always looking for an opportunity to perform.

Amy came from a religious family.

Her mother, Minnie, was a devout member of the Salvation Army, and Amy had her own divine experience when she was 17 years old.

She met this super hot preacher named Robert Semple, who was an early convert of Pentecostalism.

Amy fell deeply in love with the super hot preacher Robert Semple and with Pentecostalism.

In the early 20th century, Pentecostalism was a new Protestant religious movement that was beginning to spread across the U.S.

At the time, it was viewed as fringe within mainline Christianity, mostly because of its more dramatic elements.

Faith healing and the speaking in tongues.

This is William Schultz, Assistant Professor of American Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

In back of those specific things is the general idea of Pentecostalism, which is that everyone

needs an infilling of the Holy Spirit.

You need to open yourself up to this force beyond you, the Holy Spirit, which will flow into you and transform you, make you an entirely new person.

Pentecostalism was looked down upon by many at the time.

Followers were even disparagingly called holy rollers because when that infilling of the Holy Spirit took place, some worshipers would uncontrollably roll on the ground during services.

But Amy was deeply moved by this form of worship.

She converted to Pentecostalism and soon she and Robert Semple were married and expecting a child.

Together, they embarked on an evangelical tour to China, hoping to spread Pentecostalism to the other side of the world.

Pentecostalism would become a huge part of the rest of her life.

Robert, however.

He died within a month of them arriving in China.

Amy married again a couple of years after returning to the United States, becoming Amy Semple McPherson.

But she quickly realized that this second marriage wasn't her path.

She fell into a depression that severely impacted her mental and physical health to the point that she was hospitalized.

And in the midst of this traumatic period, she had an epiphany.

She says that Jesus came to her and said, you know,

you have to spread the word, and this is your job.

So McPherson answered the call.

She left husband number two, packed her kids and her mom into her car, and began a new life as a traveling preacher on what was called the Sawdust Trail.

The Sawdust Trail wasn't a literal trail with a set path.

Rather, roving pastors who were almost exclusively men would travel from city to city and town to town holding boisterous revival meetings.

So with the Sawdust Trail, it's a really competitive marketplace.

There are hundreds, thousands of itinerant revivalists.

And so you are in a constant state of competition with other people.

Many of these other preachers on the circuit evangelized in a sort of testosterone-laden, aggressive style.

America needs to be taken down to God's bathhouse and the hose turned on her.

And I want to take a pledge in this audience to join me in a pledge that you will never rest until this old God-hating, Christ-hating, whiskey-soaked, Sabbath-breaking, blaspheming, infidel, bootlegging old world is bound to the cross of Jesus Christ by the golden chains of love.

Sister Amy's message was nothing like that.

She had all of the charisma and theatricality, but a gentler message.

Amy packages, for lack of a better word, a really domestic style, which you don't see among many people on the Sawdust Trail.

This is my passion.

To love someone more dearly every day.

To help a wandering child to find his way,

to ponder o'er a mobile box and play

and smile when evening falls.

This is my pet.

She emphasizes her connection with people.

This image of a simple country person, a milkmaid who has been infused with this divine power.

And this might be the thing which allows Amy

to rise out of this very competitive religious marketplace.

McPherson intuitively knew how to reach people and used whatever mass media tools were at her disposal.

At first, she used a megaphone and then started a monthly magazine.

With her success, she wasn't just popularizing her ministry, she was popularizing Pentecostalism itself.

One of the foundational leaders of American Pentecostalism was a black pastor named William Seymour.

Seymour wanted to create an interracial church where congregants of any any race could worship together.

But by 1914, segregation caused the denomination to split.

There's the sort of the white Pentecostal movement and the African-American, and they're both pretty fringy.

Amy Simple McPherson began ministering around the time of this split and popularized the predominantly white version of Pentecostalism to the masses.

I have compared her both sort of positively and negatively to Elvis.

She made it a spectacle.

She made it palatable.

You know what I mean?

She made it white.

So all the things that like kind of popularizing does in the way that Elvis did with the blues, right?

So it's like, you know, the origins are very much elsewhere, but she

was sort of this bridge.

In 1918, after three years of making a name for herself on the Sawdust Trail, McPherson's profile had grown, but the endless traveling was beginning to wear on her.

After her daughter nearly died from the 1918 flu, McPherson claimed that she was called by God to head west and build a permanent church.

And that church would be in Los Angeles.

It was a decision that ultimately would reverberate not just through the city, but the future of American Christianity.

Los Angeles, in many ways, was the perfect fit for Amy Semple McPherson.

For one, the city was playing a pivotal role in the rise of Pentecostalism because it's where William Seymour's revival was located.

But also, LA in 1918 was a small but rapidly growing city packed with Christian migrants from the Midwest and South.

It was a place looking for spiritual guidance.

Not long after arriving in Los Angeles, McPherson and her mother found an empty lot for sale across from Echo Park Lake.

She felt this was where her church should be built.

She imagined her temple to be a grand coliseum-like neoclassical structure with a soaring dome overhead.

And while those combination of words generally conjure a very specific type of macho architecture, she built this structure to mirror her femininity.

It looks like a wedding cake to me.

It's got a lot of gilded, soft floral edges to it.

It's a version of power, you know, like

you see some buildings and it's obvious that they are supposed to be signifying like power and permanence.

But I think there is this thing

where you don't see that many buildings that have so much money poured into them that are so

female.

McPherson and her mother Minnie were able to work out a unique deal with a construction company that was famous for building movie palaces around the city.

They allowed her to pay in installments and build whatever they could afford incrementally.

McPherson would travel around holding revivals to raise funds, and they would construct parts of the temple piecemeal as the money came in.

I believe she bought the property by Echo Park in 1921.

There was a little story in Los Angeles Times that was like, Lady Evangelist has big ideas, you know.

And

yeah, two years later, she opens the largest church in America.

Oh, I wish that you might know the joy of it.

The preaching the gospel, the seeing the thousands wending their way down the altars to kneel at the feet of Jesus, the crucified.

And now, after all of these years,

they've come to crown our labors, beautiful Angelus Temple.

On New Year's Day of 1923, McPherson opened the Angelus Temple, home to the ministry that she named the Four Square Church.

Inside, there was a room for performing miracle cures, a watchtower that acted as a round-the-clock prayer room, a room dedicated to speaking in tongues.

People dubbed it the Million Dollar Temple.

Its auditorium sat 5,300 people in tiered stadium-style seating.

The stage could accommodate a 100-person choir, a full orchestra, and elaborate stage sets.

And when people would look up, they would see that the ceiling was painted blue to look like the sky or the heavens, and they were dotted with puffy clouds.

Of course, extravagantly built houses of worship were not a new thing.

They existed in many religions and many cultures.

But in Protestant Christianity, there had been this belief since the 16th century that the church should be small and humble because that would signal a more intimate relationship with God.

But Sister Amy wanted to bring the spirited energy and large congregation of the big roving tent revival style worship permanently indoors.

And in doing so, she helped create the blueprint for all the megachurches that came after her.

You know, if you go to a megachurch today, like that, this, this is what Amy sort of innovated, of bringing this big, rowdy,

wild mass worship inside and every Sunday.

From the moment the temple opened, Sunday services at the Angeles Temple were an instant hit, mostly because McPherson put on the best show in town.

She incorporated a lot of vaudeville, a lot of Hollywood into her sermons.

So she would do these, they were called illustrated sermons, but they were essentially, you know, I mean, like early Christian entertainment.

Because this was Los Angeles and LA was at its core a small town at the time, Sister Amy had access to people who worked in the movie business.

She tapped Hollywood stage managers, set designers, lighting designers, and makeup artists to bring her vision to life.

She would bring, you know, lions onto the stage, camels, elaborate sets, incredible costumes, huge, you know, musical theater productions.

And Sister Amy herself was the riveting center of it all.

But now the little piggy goes in his house.

Things go, I see the wolf coming, but I'm not afraid.

And as he rises to the house, he says,

Pinky, Wakey,

will you let me in?

He said,

by my chubby chin-chin, I'll never let you in.

And the wolf says, all right, then,

I'll hop and I'll hop and I'll

blow your house in.

McPherson was preaching to a packed house regularly.

There were so many congregants that Foursquare had to add a third service on Sundays.

And even though the temple already fit 5,300 seats, sometimes over 7,000 worshipers would cram into the Angeles Temple.

Sister Amy herself was becoming a Los Angeles institution.

Are you familiar with the Hooray for Hollywood song?

This is Dan Scott, head docent of the Angeles Temple Heritage Museum again.

Yeah, she's actually in that song.

So it's that hooray for Hollywood.

And then later it goes, and Shirley Temple and Amy Sample is equally.

Hooray for my

world.

Despite her incredible popularity and status as a local celebrity, McPherson knew that she could reach far more people than a few thousand Angelinos a week.

So the year after she opened the Angelus Temple, she also built her very own Christian radio station where she could reach followers as far away as Hawaii.

I'm very, very happy indeed to have the privilege of speaking to the radio audience.

Angelus Temple, myself as pastor of the temple, was the first church in the world to own a radio station.

And when those shining silver towers that were lifted up above our temple dome and flashed the message east, west, north, and south, our opportunity and privilege was broadened by hundreds of thousands of people who united with our radio church audience but now with a in person the services engaged with sets costumes and lighting changes but mcpherson understood that with the radio she could communicate just as effectively because of the intimacy of hearing a voice speaking to you in your home I read it somewhere about this early theory of radio, which I loved.

Somebody called it

that you could have your hand on the doorknob of living rooms across America,

which is kind of creepy.

But like this idea of like, you know, I mean, people

could be touched by media.

Amy Simple McPherson blended entertainment with religion and broadcast it out to the world, creating a template for American televangelism.

You know, she's not the founder of televangelism.

William Schultz, again.

It would, I think, be very proper to say televangelism and radio evangelism would be unthinkable without

the

path blazed by Amy in the early 20th century.

Within just a couple of years of establishing her ministry, the Four Square Gospel Association already had 32 church branches in Southern California, with dozens of other churches applying to become affiliates of the Angelus Temple.

She also feels the need to just constantly keep the church growing.

This is one of the defining features of the megachurch movement, the idea that growth itself is a positive good.

If your church is growing, you're spreading God's kingdom, and you need to grow in order to continue growing because people want to be part of something that seems to be booming.

But all of that growth came with an immense amount of pressure.

McPherson kept an utterly grueling schedule.

If she wasn't expanding the church, she was preaching at the temple.

And if she wasn't preaching at the temple, she was on the radio.

And if she wasn't on the radio, she was tending to her congregants.

She was also under a very intense kind of scrutiny as a woman in a position of power.

She was trapped by the role she had created.

That she constantly has to put up this front, that she constantly has to sell herself as a perfect woman that ultimately becomes so destructive.

And that self-destruction manifested in some truly bizarre ways.

As we make our way into her bedroom, this wall here represents her kidnapping, which I'm sure you heard about or read about too.

But in a nutshell.

After the break, Sister Amy's story takes a turn for the scandalous.

Stay with us.

You may think that feeling safe at home means having good locks or an alarm that makes loud noises, but the truth is, true security takes more.

With SimplySafe's new active guard outdoor protection, you get a system that works to prevent break-ins from ever happening in the first place.

AI-powered cameras plus live monitoring agents detect suspicious activity around your property.

If someone's lurking, agents talk to them in real time, turn on spotlights, and can call the police, proactively deterring crime before it starts.

My whole goal in life is to worry less, and the Simply Safe system just allows me to keep a bird's eye view of what's going on in my home.

The kids are older.

They come and go at all hours of the night, sometimes in the middle of the night, and I like to know that it's them coming home safe at 3 a.m.

and not someone trying to break into my house.

I think someone trying to break into my house would make less noise and not just start making eggs in the middle of the night, but you know what I'm saying.

Visit simplysafe.com slash invisible to claim 50% off a new system with a professional monitoring plan and get your first month free at simplysafe.com/slash invisible.

There's no safe, like SimplySafe.

Forged by nature and alive with fall color, Maine does autumn the way it's meant to be.

Think quiet, misty mornings, glowing foliage, salt-scented breezes, then fresh lobster, just pressed cider, and warm doughnuts straight from the farm.

There's no script here, just woods, waves, and whatever comes next.

This fall, write your story in Maine.

Start planning at visitmaine.com.

If you're an entrepreneur looking to grow, MasterCard's Small Business Navigator is your go-to resource.

Small and mid-sized businesses make up over 99% of all U.S.

businesses, and for their owners, it's more than a job.

It's a passion.

MasterCard's Small Business Navigator fuels that passion by providing expert insights, cybersecurity tools, financial resources, and exclusive offers to help your business thrive.

Because MasterCard believes that when small business wins, everybody wins.

To learn more and take advantage of limited time offers, visit mastercard.com slash navigator.

Terms and conditions apply.

Offers are subject to change.

This episode is brought to you by PNC Bank.

Some people think podcasts about architecture are boring.

Yeah, well, sometimes the details are boring, but that's what creates stable foundations and construction that lasts.

And that's something that everyone wants.

It's like banking with PNC.

It might seem boring to save, plan, and make calculated decisions with your bank, but keeping your money boring is what helps you live a happily fulfilled life.

PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865.

PNC Bank National Association, member FDIC.

In 1926, the Angeles Temple had been a Los Angeles institution for about three years.

Amy Simple McPherson was at the height of her fame in preaching to thousands of devoted worshipers a week.

I think there was a USC survey where students named her as one of the top three most famous women that they could think of.

That's Claire Hoffman again.

So, you know, really a household name.

But all the pressure she was under to grow the ministry, to shepherd its members, to keep them entertained, was beginning to take a toll.

McPherson made herself available at all hours to the church and had no privacy or solitude.

So she is starting to feel the stress of her celebrity and the burdens of her job.

She's got 10, 15,000 people coming to see her preach on a lot of days.

And so she starts to do this routine where she drives down to Venice Beach from downtown and she sits in the sun and she swims in the ocean and she works on her sermons.

Which is exactly what she did on May 18th, 1926.

On this particular day, McPherson was writing a sermon called Light and Darkness when she was approached by a man and a woman that she had never seen before.

And they say, Mrs.

McPherson, you know, we have a baby in the car who's sick.

Will you please come and pray over her?

As a faith healer, McPherson was very used to getting these kinds of requests.

The Angela's Temple even had a dedicated room for all of the crutches and wheelchairs left behind by people who had been miraculously healed.

So she followed the couple to their car to heal their sick child.

In the back seat, she sees like a pile of blankets and she thinks, oh, this must be the baby.

And they open up the door and she thinks she's going to pray for the baby, but instead she gets hit on the head and she has something put over her mouth and she passes out.

McPherson disappeared in broad daylight without a trace.

Sister Amy's thousands of followers were stricken by her sudden disappearance and launched a massive search to find her.

Fearing she may have drowned in the Pacific, divers combed the shallows of Venice Beach and Santa Monica.

They even blasted the waters with dynamite, hoping it might surface her body.

One diver tragically died trying to find her.

Another grieving church member became so distraught that she drowned herself.

But McPherson was very much alive.

She wakes up, she doesn't know how much later, in, you know, some kind of awful bedroom, chained to a bed.

She quickly realized that she had been kidnapped by that couple who had approached her on the beach.

Somebody that she said was called Mexicale Rose, which happened to be a famous song at the time, and a guy named Steve.

Mexicale Rose and Steve told her that she was being held captive in a shack near Algua Prieta, Mexico, and that they were demanding $500,000 ransom for her return.

For weeks, McPherson found herself restrained to a bed, growing more and more delirious.

But at one point, her captors left her alone to get groceries and she saw her chance.

And she escaped by taking the ropes around her wrist and sawing them on a serrated edge of a can.

McPherson fled through a window and ran 20 miles through the blistering Mexican desert.

She eventually ended up stumbling across a small home where she found help and then immediately fainted.

She was taken to a hospital on the American side of the border.

McPherson had been missing for over a month and already presumed dead.

Her mother Minnie had even held a memorial service for her at the Angeles Temple.

But three days after that service, McPherson reappeared alive, mostly unscathed, and ready to tell her story.

And so, yeah, that's that's her kidnapping.

Can I ask a follow-up question that?

Yeah, of course.

At this point, my producer Vivian chimed in with a question.

Like, that's the story.

What do you think are the chances that happened?

one percent

i mean i'm a journalist so i never like to

say anything definitively i mean

you can never say never

but it didn't happen

when mcpherson returned to los angeles she trumpeted her harrowing journey of abduction captivity and escape but it didn't take long for people to start questioning her account it turns out there was a lot to investigate law enforcement immediately was just like,

this doesn't add up.

There were a number of holes in her kidnapping story.

By her own account, she had been walking 20 plus miles in the blazing hot Sonoran desert.

Yet when she was rescued, she was in suspiciously good physical shape.

You know, she wasn't sunburned.

She wasn't cut.

She wasn't bruised.

She didn't ask for water.

There was also the fact that law enforcement was never able to locate the shack in Agua Prieta that she claimed she escaped from.

Instead, they found other evidence that suggested something else.

They spent days looking for the shack that she said she was trapped in, and they, you know, they never found it.

They found tire marks more like a half a mile from where she showed up with footprints that matched, you know, the slippers she was wearing.

So it looked like she had gotten, somebody had gotten out of a car and kind of walked over to the yard where she appeared.

There were also long-standing rumors that McPherson was having having an affair with a married radio engineer at her station, KFSG, which led to a theory that she hadn't been in Mexico at all, but hiding out with her lover in California.

Soon witnesses started to kind of come out of the woodwork and say like, actually, we saw Amy not in Mexico, but in Northern California, in Carmel by the Sea, you know, where she was wearing a disguise and living in what the press called a love shack.

There were several other witness sightings and pieces of evidence, and as other details were uncovered, it became more and more likely that McPherson had concocted the kidnapping story in order to conceal her affair and protect her reputation.

This alleged affair became the focal point of an investigation against her, and the district attorney ended up charging McPherson with fabricating evidence, lying under oath, and conspiracy to commit a hoax.

So they do this pre-trial hearing, which takes months and set records for its cost.

It was the most expensive trial in Los Angeles' history until the Manson murders, and it was just every day on the front pages.

During her ascent, Sister Amy had been a darling of the media.

But by this point, newspapers all over the country had turned against her in cruel and misogynistic ways.

They scrutinized her appearance, her divorce, the size of her ankles.

She wasn't completely happy, however, this time.

There are shadows in the sky, but I'm sure that many people out there have their own particular troubles.

Only mine always somehow unfortunately seem to get into the headlines.

Through it all, McPherson stuck by her story, claiming the CD gangster underworld, corrupt politicians, Satan, and the Catholics were all plotting to take her down.

McPherson suffered an onslaught against her credibility, and things were looking pretty grim.

But surprisingly, about a month into the investigation, McPherson was presented with an unusual unusual defense to her story.

Unfortunately for McPherson, the defense would come in the form of one of the least credible witnesses in legal history, a woman named Lorraine Weissman-Seeliff.

And Lorraine Weissman-Seeliff is like a character that I feel like could only exist in the 1920s.

You know, she had had a railroad accident and kind of lost her mind.

She'd been in, you know, lunatic houses and was like a, you know, kind of hustler scam artist who maybe also was schizophrenic and who had a twin sister.

The district attorney's leading theory for McPherson's whereabouts was that she had been hiding out in Carmel with her lover.

But Wiseman Sealiff showed up to the Angelus Temple, claiming that the mysterious woman spotted in Carmel wasn't McPherson, but Wiseman Sealif herself.

And Amy's like, fantastic, great.

This was such a convenient counter story that McPherson leapt at the opportunity.

She actually moved Wiseman Sealif the parsonage of the Angeles Temple so that she could coach Wiseman Sealiff on ways to make her appear more convincing.

It eventually came out that McPherson and Weissman Sealiff had been conspiring with one another, which caused yet another media storm.

But in the end, it didn't really matter.

The charges against McPherson were dismissed before they ever went to trial because there wasn't quite enough evidence to prove that she wasn't kidnapped, and officials in Los Angeles were desperate to be rid of this case because of the media circus it had caused.

And it truly was a circus with all sorts of unhinged details that we couldn't even get into for this story, such as the sole alleged other witness to her kidnappers was, first of all, a blind attorney who was related to President McKinley, but that then he dies just as he's about to give like further evidence in a car accident where he drowns in a ditch of like one foot of water.

See what I mean?

As for Sister Amy and America's first megachurch, oddly enough, even with her name being dragged through the mud and every headline, the whole debacle ended up being great for the church.

Angela's Temple actually grew during the scandal.

Put that in the there's no such thing as bad publicity files.

But in terms of her fame, I mean, this was an era where you start to have the emergence of these figures who come to embody like a single type, like Babe Ruth, right, as the athlete or Charles Lindbergh as the adventurer.

Amy was the preacher.

You know, and just to pause, like the outreach is incredible.

You know, I mean, there was a year in the early 1930s where she spoke to over 2 million people.

You know, she was, you know, the Angelus Temple and Amy were at the center of public service during the Great Depression.

They, you know, helped house people.

I mean, it was, it was incredible, but she, she definitely screwed up like mega, you know.

But

at the same time, she accomplished so much.

For the next couple of decades, the Four Square ministry expanded, but McPherson herself struggled.

She suffered from poor health, poor financial decisions, lawsuits, a questionable third marriage, and ultimately became estranged from her own mother and daughter, the two closest people in her life.

On September 27th, 1944, McPherson was in Oakland for a series of revival meetings when it all came to an end.

She gives one of her most famous sermons, The Story of My Life, and she goes home that night to the hotel.

She's with her son and had

bottles of prescription medicine that they can't trace to where she got them.

And she

took the whole bottle, or a lot of it, and she died.

Even after McPherson died, her church continued to live on and grow.

There are thousands of Four Square churches around the world today with millions of members.

But while followers may remember Amy Semple McPherson as an important religious figure, for those not in the church, she is more likely to be remembered for the scandal and tragic end to her life, if at all.

You really have to understand she was like a forerunner of getting that from like kind of the fringe of

religion into the mainstream.

You know, now there are 600 million Pentecostals in the world.

It's a quarter of the world's Christians.

It has moved from the absolute fringe, the mainstream, and she's a big part of that story.

So we can go down the methane here, watch your step.

Let me just show you what it used to look like, though, when Sister was here.

Now it's very plain Jane.

But when she was here,

it was quite lovely.

Wow.

These are the steps.

Walking around the Angelus Temple, it's clear that the building itself is a long way from its opulent beginnings.

The church has had to evolve with modern culture, but modernization in many ways has sanded away some of the details that made this building singular.

The prayer tower is now an HVAC room.

The iconic KFSG station was sold to help pay for a parking structure.

The 100-person choir has been traded in for contemporary music.

Even that heavenly sky-blue dome designed to evoke the outdoor revival is now obscured by sound-absorbing panels.

Because with the newer modern drums and keyboards and electric guitars for the music and the worship,

this room was terrible.

It just caused a lot of noise.

It may be a bit more subdued these days, but the Angelus Temple makes for a fitting monument to the woman who built it.

Enormously influential, half-forgotten, and even after all these years, still begging to be noticed.

99% Invisible was reported this week by Gillian Jacobs, produced by Vivian Lay and edited by Kelly Prime.

Mix by Martin Gonzalez.

Music by Swan Real and George Langford.

Fact-checking by Graham Haysha.

And special thanks this week to Bix Davis and Richard Florey.

Claire Hoffman's book is called Sister Sinner, The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Amy Simple McPherson.

It is such a fun read.

It's packed with lots of juicy details that we couldn't fit into this episode, so you should definitely check it out.

Kathy Too is our executive producer.

Kurt Colston is the digital director.

Delaney Hall is our senior editor.

The rest of the team includes Chris Barubay, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars.

The 99% of Visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful, uptown.

Oakland, California.

You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server.

There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

I ain't going to be my Lord anymore.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid, all in one place.

From consultations to events and experiences, showcase your offerings with a customizable website designed to attract clients and grow your business.

With their collection of cutting-edge design tools, anyone can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their brand or business.

And Squarespace's intuitive built-in analytics tools can help you make smarter business decisions by letting you review website traffic, focus on key areas of engagement, and track revenue from bookings, invoices, or product sales, all from one place.

I set up RomanMars.com, my Squarespace site, so long ago it was very simple and it's sort of dynamically refreshed by social media posts and other tools.

And so I don't really have to fuss with it, which is the greatest gift Squarespace can give me.

Head to squarespace.com/slash invisible for a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.