Angelus Temple's founding story ends with McPherson's disappearance and return; a different institution she built at the same address ran through the years after, largely apart from the pulpit drama. The Angelus Temple commissary opened in August 1928, more than a year before the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, but the crash transformed a modest relief operation into one of Los Angeles's largest sources of aid for the poor, open around the clock, seven days a week, for the length of the crisis.
The commissary distributed food, clothing, shelter, medical assistance and cash to anyone who came asking, without a means test and without regard to race or religion, a policy the temple maintained even as many contemporary relief agencies drew lines around who qualified for help. McPherson's biographer Daniel Mark Epstein later described it as one of the region's most effective and inclusive welfare institutions, crediting it with feeding lunch to children whose schools could not and handing out bread and quilts to families turned away elsewhere. Over the course of the Depression the commissary fed and clothed more than a million people, a figure the Foursquare denomination's own history places above one and a half million.
The journalist Carey McWilliams, no friend to McPherson's theology, credited the temple with something plainer: it made migrants feel at home in a city that had not built anything else to receive them. The commissary outlived the scandal that had followed McPherson through the same decade, running as a fixture of Echo Park's daily life well after the courtroom questions about her disappearance had been dropped, a second legacy built on giving food away rather than drawing crowds to hear about it.