122 FEMINIST VIEWS THAT UNDERMINE SCRIPTURE
There is no doubt that God accomplished much good through
Aimee Semple McPherson, including the founding of the International
Church of the Foursquare Gospel and of the 5,300-seat Angeles Temple
in Los Angeles. C. M. Robeck says, “She was undoubtedly the most
prominent woman leader Pentecostalism has produced to date.”^7 She
was perhaps the most prominent woman leader in the entire history of
Christianity in America.
But there was much personal tragedy after she began preaching
widely around 1915, including her divorce in 1921; the scandal
of her disappearance while swimming off Venice Beach in 1926,
followed by her subsequent discovery in Mexico a month later; a
nervous breakdown in 1930; another failed marriage in 1931; and
death from “an apparently accidental overdose of a medical
prescription” in 1944.^8
Another tragic example is found more recently in the life of Judy
Brown. Brown was a popular Bible teacher at Central Bible College
(Assemblies of God) in Springfield, Missouri. She wrote a book,
Women Ministers According to Scripture,^9 in which she argued exten-
sively for an evangelical feminist position. She later moved to Salem,
Virginia, and became pastor of the Salem Worship Center church. But
on March 26, 2004, Brown was sentenced to thirty years in prison
when she was found guilty of “malicious wounding and burglary with
the intent to commit murder.”^10 She had begun a lesbian relationship
with the wife of another pastor, Ted Smart, and then attempted to mur-
der Pastor Smart to get him out of the way. According to the report in
World magazine,
Then, on Aug. 25, 2003, when Mrs. Smart was out of town and after
their son left for school, Ms. Brown broke into the family’s basement.
She threw the switches on the fusebox, shutting off power in the(^7) C. M. Robeck, Jr., “Aimee Semple McPherson,” in International Dictionary of Pentecostal
and Charismatic Movements, rev. and expanded ed., ed. Stanley M. Burgess and Eduard van
der Maas (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2002), 858.
(^8) Ibid., 856-859.
(^9) Judy L. Brown, Women Ministers According to Scripture (Springfield, Ill.: Judy L. Brown,
1996).
(^10) Gene Edward Veith, “Murder, She Wrote: The Strange and Sad Case of Felon/Theologian
Judy Brown,” World, April 30, 2005, 29.