In 1918, Foursquare’s founder Aimee Semple McPherson began a three-week revival in Tulsa, Okla., right in the middle of the influenza epidemic. The U.S. government had placed a ban on public gatherings. God told her to go anyway. McPherson testified that the Spirit urged her to come to Tulsa anyway and “Start immediately.” Aimee obeyed, and the government lifted the ban for just those three weeks, and hundreds of people came to know Jesus in Tulsa!
According to her own account, while she was in Tulsa, she traveled the streets ministering to “epidemic victims.” Afternoons and evenings, McPherson and her band of workers would roll through the streets and stop to minister to those who were sick with the influenza were “ceaseless.”
She says, “The epidemic still raging, and many having been weakened and afflicted, we stood hours at a time praying of the sick, and Jesus helped those who came to him.”