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Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), founder of the Foursquare Church, was born near Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada to Mildred (Minnie) Pearce, a Salvation Army worker, and James Kennedy, a Methodist farmer. As a precocious teenager, Aimee Kennedy grappled with difficult questions including the relationship between faith and science, but she also enjoyed popular culture and practiced her skills of performance and dramatic reading. In 1907 she attended a series of Pentecostal meetings conducted by evangelist Robert Semple, where she experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit and…

Alice Belle Garrigus (1858–1949), born in Rockville, Connecticut, was the founder of Pentecostalism in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Her sympathetic biographer, Burton K. Janes, based much of his work about her on the autobiography she published in serialized form in Good Tidings, the official publication of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Newfoundland and Labrador, in 1939–1940 (Janes 1982, 1983). Garrigus’s life story is a familiar one in Newfoundland religious history. One popular publication with the subtitle “The Story of What …

Gender Studies holds great promise for Pentecostal scholarship because it pays attention to the roles that are assigned to men and women, to the power dynamics that result, and to the ways in which people order their lives within particular cultures. While cultural norms vary by region, gender studies can help to unlock these differences on both local and global stages. The binary consideration of male and female genders (a somewhat dated concept given recent attention to gender fluidity) still serves as a useful starting place to discuss how gender and Pentecostalism intersect.Gender …

Zelma Argue (1900–1980) was a Canadian evangelist, musician, pastor and writer. The eldest daughter of Eva and A.H. Argue of Winnipeg, Manitoba, she was raised in a Pentecostal household after her father’s baptism in the Holy Spirit in Chicago in 1907. The Argue family was well-known in North American Pentecostal circles, because of their travelling ministry and their leadership ties to William Durham, Aimee Semple McPherson, Maria Woodworth-Etter, and Charles S. Price, among others. As young ad…