Robert Edward McAlister was born into a large Presbyterian farming family in Renfrew County, Ontario, in 1880. The family moved to Cobden, Ontario, in 1891, where McAlister had an important conversion experience in the holiness congregation led by Ralph Cecil Horner—an important Canadian radical holiness evangelist and founder of the Holiness Movement Church and the Standard Church of America. McAlister studied at God’s Bible School in Cincinnati, Ohio, during 1900–1902, before returning home due to illness, where, in 1904, h…