Charles S. Price

Charles Sydney Price was an English-born minister of a fashionable Congregational church on the American West Coast who had left the old doctrines behind and said so from the pulpit. In 1921 he went to Aimee Semple McPherson's meetings in San Jose intending to write them up as fraud, and came away converted, baptized in the Spirit, and preaching what he had come to mock. His campaigns filled arenas across the Pacific Northwest and western Canada; the 1923 Vancouver meetings packed the city's arena night after night. A committee of local clergy and doctors afterward traced the people who claimed healing and reported that most could not be verified, a finding Price's supporters disputed and his critics never let go of. He kept preaching for another twenty-four years, wrote The Real Faith, edited a monthly magazine, and grew notably more careful in his claims as he aged.