Delegates at the annual convention of the International Foursquare Gospel Church have chosen the Rev. Jack Hayford, a nationally known evangelist, as their new president.
He replaces the Rev. Paul Risser, who resigned in the wake of an investment scam that could cost the Pentecostal denomination as much as $15 million.
Hayford was the founding pastor of the Church of the Way, which began in 1969 with 18 members and grew into a 10,000-strong megachurch in the Southern California suburb of Van Nuys.
In recent years, Hayford has established himself as a popular evangelical writer and led pastor-training seminars around the country.
His election as the new leader of the 4 million-member church was announced Friday, the final day of a convention that has brought 3,000 Pentecostal pastors and church leaders to the Hilton Hotel and Convention Center in downtown San Francisco.
According to convention coordinator Ron Williams, Hayford got 63 percent of the vote. He ran against two other candidates: the Rev. Glenn Burris, a denominational leader who oversaw 7,000 Foursquare pastors, and the Rev. James Hayford Sr., who is the senior pastor of Eastside Foursquare Church in suburban Seattle, and is also Jack Hayford's younger brother.
The Hayford brothers were both raised in Oakland in the 1940s and 1950s.
Oakland is also the city where the founder of the Foursquare Gospel Church, Aimee Semple McPherson, died of a sleeping pill overdose on Sept. 27, 1944.
McPherson, a flamboyant faith healer and early radio evangelist, founded the church in Los Angeles in 1923 with the opening of the spectacular Angelus Temple near Echo Park.
She made national headlines in May 1926 when she disappeared from a Southern California beach. McPherson reappeared in Mexico the next month, claiming to have been kidnapped, but was accused by others of having run off with a former radio operator at her Los Angeles temple.
Her movement now counts 4,113,981 members around the world, most of them outside the United States.
In October, the Foursquare Church sold its Los Angeles radio station to Spanish Broadcasting Systems, Inc. for $250 million.
Up to $15 million of those funds were lost in a series of investments Risser made in two alleged Ponzi schemes that targeted wealthy evangelical church leaders.
Risser himself has not been charged with any crime and remains popular with church members.
"Paul is a patriarch of our church,'' Williams said. "He may be the most deeply loved man in the Foursquare Church.''
The Rev. Robert Christian, the pastor of the Rivers Church, a Foursquare congregation in Yuba City, agreed that Risser was still popular.
"It was a misjudgment,'' Christian said. "There has been repentance and forgiveness.''