The Foursquare Church

McPherson's book This Is That, published at Los Angeles in 1923, reprints her reports from The Bridal Call, the paper she edited. Its chapter Under the Big Top tells of her tent campaign at Oakland.

A letter from an Oakland pastor printed in the same book is dated 3 August 1922. Its writer had wanted her to come to Oakland for several years, so he wrote as one of her hosts.

Her report says that a ministerial conference met in the campaign's last week. There the “Four-Square Gospel Association” was organized “for the purpose of banding together ministers and laymen of various Evangelical churches in fellowship and co-operation to further the cause of Evangelism throughout the land.”

The report adds that more than a thousand people signed the Association's statement of doctrine on its first day.

The church's own history dates the opening of Angelus Temple in Los Angeles to January 1923.

B. W. Huntsman, a minister of the Brighton Church of Christ in Melbourne, wrote one of the testimonials McPherson printed in This Is That. He wrote that she came to tell the “four-square” gospel of Jesus the Savior, Jesus the Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, Jesus the Great Physician and Jesus the Coming King.

Huntsman recalled her opening sentence. “Now,” she said, “I want to introduce Jesus.” He wrote that this became the keynote of the campaign.

The Declaration confesses the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as “three, equal in every divine perfection.”

Its article X expects believers to receive the Holy Spirit “after the same manner” as in Acts, and it does not use the words “initial evidence.”

The Assemblies of God's statement of 1916, by contrast, calls speaking in tongues the “initial sign” of the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

The church's history page dates the Bible institute to February 1923, founded “to train men and women alike.”

The same page dates the first steps to incorporate the church to December 1927, and it gives the church's worldwide membership without the year of the count.

On 18 May 1926 McPherson disappeared while swimming near Los Angeles. The Washington Times of 23 June reported her mother's word that she was alive at Agua Prieta in Mexico, and that Captain A. L. Slayton had spoken with her by telephone at Douglas.

She said she had been kidnapped, and Matthew Avery Sutton, her biographer at Harvard University Press in 2007, says she never changed that account. In a 2017 interview he described two grand juries, the second of which concluded that she should stand trial.

On 10 January 1927, the United Press reported, a Los Angeles court dismissed the charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice against McPherson, her mother and Kenneth Ormiston, the temple's former radio operator. The district attorney asked for the dismissal after his chief witness was found to have given perjured testimony, so no trial was held.

Sutton notes that no prosecutor or newspaper found evidence that conclusively linked her with Ormiston that spring. He also says, “I am confident based on the circumstantial evidence that she was in Carmel with Ormiston.”