Abstract
This chapter examines the heart of Pentecostal pastoral authority—preaching performance. Woodworth-Etter and McPherson’s worship spaces and personal appearances gave skeptics and followers alike impressive signals of womanliness and ministerial authority, but the bodily acts1 performed within them in the form of revivalist preaching were what made them sacred vessels of the ministers’ messages. These “spatial practices—the ‘techniques of the body’, the formalized ‘gestures of approach’, and the location and direction of embodied movement—all contribute[d] towards producing the distinctive quality of sacred space,” in Woodworth-Etter and McPherson’s revivalist meeting places.2
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Notes
David Chidester and Edward Tabor Linenthal, American Sacred Space, Religion in North America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 10.
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Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 113.
Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1992), 176.
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W. A. Tyson, The Revival (Nashville, TN: Cokesbury Press, 1925), 187; Peck, The Revival and the Pastor, 264; Barton, One Hundred Revival Sermons and Outlines, viii; Riley, The Perennial Revival; a Plea for Evangelism, 50;
Frank Grenville Beardsley, A Mighty Winner of Souls: Charles G. Finney, a Study in Evangelism (New York: American Tract Society, 1937), 35.
J. H. MacDonald et al., The Revival: A Symposium (Cincinnati, OH: Jennings and Graham, 1905), 9.
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William Edward Biederwolf, Evangelism: Its Justification, Its Operation, and Its Value (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1921), 195–202.
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Bendroth, “Why Women Loved Billy Sunday,” 256; William T. Ellis, Billy Sunday, the Man and His Message (Philadelphia, PA: The John C. Winston Company, 1914), 165.
Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 109–10;
David Edwin Harrell, Varieties of Southern Evangelicalism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1981), 52.
Aimee Semple McPherson, “Second Coming of Christ,” The Bridal Call Foursquare 12, no. 12 (1929): 8.
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“Mrs. Aimee Hutton Home,” New York Times, August 2, 1933; Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 88.
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Charles S. Price, “The Opening,” The Bridal Call 6, no. 8 (1923): 16.
Anthony Quinn, The Original Sin: A Self-Portrait, 1 ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 125–6.
Aimee Semple McPherson, “The Story of My Life,” The Bridal Call 8, no. 10 (1925): 12.
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Aimee Semple McPherson, “The Conquering Host,” The Bridal Call Foursquare 10, no. 3 (1926): 5;
Aimee Semple McPherson, “Satan’s Master Stroke,” The Bridal Call Foursquare 10, no. 4 (1926): 21;
Aimee Semple McPherson, “The Need of the Hour,” The Bridal Call Foursquare 11, no. 3 (1927): 31.
Aimee Semple McPherson, “Mamoth Divine Healing Services,” The Bridal Call Foursquare 5, no. 3 (1921): 9.
Elizabeth C. Collier, “My Church,” The Bridal Call Foursquare 8, no. 3 (1924): 28.
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© 2015 Leah Payne
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Payne, L. (2015). “Thunder” and “Sweetness”: Authority and Gender in Pentecostal Performance. In: Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism. CHARIS: Christianity and Renewal—Interdisciplinary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494672_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137494672_6
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