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[breast milk]—I had such a quantity—and he developed bowel trouble. Day and night he had the colic too, and I was just worn out! I had no one to relieve me.” 3
    Her letter, written in the spring of 1919, credits a local faith healer for the baby’s recovery. “At last I carried the little fellow to a mission in the city where an elder I knew prayed for him,” she wrote. “The next morning he had the first natural bowel movement since his sickness began, and he has been alright ever since.”
    At the time, Virginia was on her own. There had been a falling out with the Disciples of Christ in Ukiah. Many of its members were wary of the miracle stories and faith healing testimonies that had become the center of Virginia and Hjalmer’s ministry. They lost the pulpit in Ukiah, and Hjalmer was back out on the road working for the Southern Pacific Railroad. There had been some possible church jobs backeast, but he and Virginia were quickly losing faith in the established churches.
    â€œThe old-line church will not accept our message,” she wrote.
    Virginia and her husband were caught up in the fiery spirit of the early Pentecostal movement, which had been sweeping the nation since a series of revival meetings held in Los Angeles between 1906 and 1909. It all started in the City of Angels in a little church on Azusa Street. Today, more than a century later, the Pentecostal movement counts more than 580 million adherents around the world and has come to see the Azusa Street revival as the spark that set the Holy Spirit ablaze.
    Established church leaders in mainline Protestant denominations like the Methodists, Lutherans, and Disciples of Christ were wary of the faith healers, snake handlers, and freelance prophets in the Pentecostal movement. They spoke in strange tongues. They danced in church. They fell to the floor when touched by the power of the Holy Spirit. Many Americans laughed at the “holy rollers” and saw this new wave of religious fervor as little more than a carnival sideshow.
    Equally scandalous to the churchmen of the day were women at the pulpit. Aimee Semple McPherson, a Pentecostal pioneer and founder of the International Church of the Four Square Gospel, was the best known of the flock and a role model for Virginia’s ministry. She and Hjalmer left the Disciples of Christ for the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a less restrictive network of evangelical preachers, and took their show on the road.
    Their ministry, the Berg Evangelistic Dramatic Company, arrived in Miami in March of 1925. They started with a tent and a year later opened a 4,500-seat auditorium, the Gospel Tabernacle. Newspaper advertisements for their revivals featured pictures of Virginia and Hjalmer. She was billed as “The Miracle Woman” and “A Modern Prophetess.” Her husband was listed as “Campaign Director” and “Song Leader.” Attendees were promised a “soul-stirring, heart-warming revival of New Testament Religion.”
    Not everyone loved the Miracle Woman. On the night of July 24, 1926, someone threw a piece of coral through the window of the Miami church and struck Virginia just as she was about to begin her nightly service. According to the police, the unidentified assailant wasa man upset that two young girls had joined Mrs. Berg’s church. It was a strange incident—foreshadowing the opposition David Berg would encounter decades later from parents upset that their children had joined his sect. Just days before the attack, Virginia received threatening letters warning her to get out of town or face a fate more serious than “another well known evangelist of the same faith experienced.” 4 That was an obvious reference to Aimee Semple McPherson, who presided over the 5,300-seat Angelus Temple on the other side of the country, in southern California. McPherson disappeared in May 1926. She later resurfaced, claiming to have