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The last book I finished reading in 2025 was Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson, by Claire Hoffman. I'm sure I am not the first person to compare McPherson, the founder of the Foursquare Church, with our Quaker pioneer, George Fox.
I already knew the broad outlines of McPherson's three decades in the public eye as an evangelist, healer, pastor, and founder of the USA's first megachurch. Hoffman's book gives a fascinating and balanced account of her life. She begins the book with one of the most dramatic events of McPherson's life—her disappearance from a Los Angeles beach in 1926—but provides historical, biographical, and theological context for her precedent-breaking career as a whole. The author gives us plenty of material from which to draw some connections with Fox.
One important factor that isn't a parallel is, of course, gender. However we feel about McPherson's claim to be empowered directly by the Holy Spirit, she had plenty of talent, giftedness, persistence, and amazing audacity behind her ascendancy as a woman to a status of, arguably, the most famous Christian celebrity in the USA of her time, far beyond her Pentecostal community. There were occasions when she could draw spontaneous crowds of tens of thousands of people, of whom thousands simply wanted to experience her healing power.
Here are some of the points that caused me to compare McPherson and Fox.
They both emphasized the possibility and importance of the immediate experience of the Holy Spirit. Theologically, McPherson was rather a centrist in the spectrum of evangelical Christianity of her time. She didn't deviate much from the fundamentalism of her early Christian experience, but her presentation of Christian faith emphasized grace and intimacy with God rather than legalism and fear of punishment. I think that many of Fox's evangelistic presentations in his itinerant ministry, and his epistles, could have (with updated English) come from McPherson as well.
They both used the communication channels of their time effectively. For Fox and his companions, it was the printing press, which is where McPherson also started, but she became a radio pioneer as well. (Toward the end of her life, McPherson was researching the possibilities of television.) Both of them published constantly, not only to present their own message, but also to argue with detractors. Fox and his movement were, at times, under attack from the Christian establishment and under persecution by their government. They responded nonviolently but certainly not passively as they flooded the market with books, tracts, and petitions. McPherson's disappearance and subsequent very controversial reappearance led to massive campaigns both for her and against her in the mass media of her times, and in the courtrooms of Los Angeles.
Both Fox and McPherson relied on women gifted in administration, fundraising, and oversight. Aimee Semple McPherson's support and accountability person for much of her career was her mother, Mildred Kennedy. For George Fox, Margaret Fell took on this role, alongside her evident gifts as theologian and communicator, and eventually she and Fox married.
In both cases, they developed leadership structures, with boards and committees, and those structures (with major changes over the years) exist to this day. The Foursquare Church continues as a worldwide fellowship, and so do we Friends. We have dispersed accountability and leadership arrangements compared with the more unified and centralized Foursquare structure, and we don't have one official statement of faith as Foursquare does, but we've both managed to take a fellowship that began with a single powerful personality and make it durable.
This leads to another similarity. Both movements have succeeded in honoring their founders without exaggerating their status as heroes. At the end of Claire Hoffman's book, she emphasizes this point about McPherson; there's little evidence of a personality cult around her in the present-day Foursquare Church. Neither is she hidden; she gets full credit for her role in starting the church, but is not an object of adoration. Fox's status among us Quakers is rather ambiguous; we quote him when it suits us, but often leaving out the full context of his intended meaning. In both cases, some of these leaders' more extravagant behaviors and claims have been downplayed since then. Speaking in tongues and healing continue to be expected in Foursquare fellowships, but Fox's accounts of miraculous healings (such as those included in Fox's Book of Miracles) have not led to similar expectations among us.
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| Contents of George Fox's 'Book of Miracles', compiled and introduced by Henry Cadbury. |
The expansion of the Quaker movement in Fox's lifetime was remarkable, although in the succeeding centuries we have lost momentum numerically, to say the least. It may be too soon to draw comparisons with Foursquare's growth. Nor did we ever have megachurches or anything resembling McPherson's Angelus Temple. The differences between our two movements may be just as fruitful to explore as the similarities; I just wanted to point out those similarities as I closed the covers of Hoffman's fascinating book. What instructive differences and similarities occur to you?
Related: Happy Birthday, charismatics. (2010.)
Something even older: here's an interesting article by Carey Mcwilliams on "cults" in California, from the March 1946 issue of The Atlantic. It was cited in the notes of Claire Hoffman's book.
Another year's worth of "useful theology from a Quaker-shaped Christian," Mark Russ.
From archive.org: Public Domain Day 2026.
Martin Kelley (Quaker Ranter) traces the origin of the Quaker SPICES testimonies.
A favorite-books list I always look forward to: Nancy Thomas. PS: We agreed about Sister, Sinner.
Sue Foley is a force of nature....
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