ABSTRACT
An advertisement appeared in the Wichita newspapers the morning of May 7, 1922, announcing Aimee’s standard three-weeks meeting to be held at the Forum. Following the headlines of “Aimee Semple McPherson, Today Forum, A Message for Soul and Body” was a brief paragraph noting the sponsorship of her meetings: “Mrs. McPherson has a local advisory committee, composed of members from the leading denominations. In prayer and faith they give you this invitation to share in the good news.”1 It was Aimee’s first visit to the Sunflower State —a place where intolerance in both religion and politics had often flared into violence, the future setting for Truman Capote’s brilliant In Cold Blood, where under “the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the windbent wheat.”2 Two decades earlier, the modern movement of Pentecostalism had been birthed in the state and also experienced its most violent opposition. Prophetic figures flourished for a time, like wheat under the big Kansas sky and many, like grain at harvest time, were just as quickly cut down. Somehow the struggles and significance, the tensions and triumphs of Aimee’s early ministry are seen with the greatest of clarity during her three-week stay in Wichita. It was as if she became prismatic under the hot Kansas sun, refracting for all to see a visible spectrum of previously held inner thoughts. Nowhere else is her place in American religious history so easily revealed in so short a period of time.
