We’re going to take a deep dive into modern Mormon schisms, from the ones dating to Joseph Smith’s death to modern ones. Last time we did an overview of the Succession Crisis. This time we’ll learn how modern groups descend from older groups including Cutlerites, Hedrickites, Strangites, Brighamites, and Josephites. It’s an amazing conversation you don’t want to miss. Check it out!
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Rigdon/Parrish/Whitmer Purify
John 00:33 So, just to take a look at some of the examples and put them together here. Purification churches are more likely to get back to the blue. So, I was talking about blue as being that New York [period.] When they’re an active church here, and my symbols now going forward, and so these are active at the time, but they won’t be in the future, anyway, in our present. If they’re a little star like this, that’s showing like that it’s the active church that’s alive. And then if it’s a circle, that means it’s an iteration that we’ve moved past or that is now extinct or has been superseded by a new successive organization. Anyway, that’s just a symbol here for the symbols I’m using.
John 1:19 So for purified folks, examples of this are Warren Parrish, Sidney Rigdon, David Whitmer. So, we mentioned, for example, the Whitmerite churches. Here are the two dates now, finally. The first of those Whitmerite church is 1847-1848, is that one that is the church that McLellin is running in Whitmer’s name, that the Whitmer’s disavow. Then, Whitmer much later here, I guess, it’s 1875 to 1961, is reorganized as their own Whitmerite church. And it’s only gone extinct, like I said, in the 1960s, finally. But it’s a church that is very New York in its origin. Everybody has their own seer stones, again. They’re all receiving revelations. It’s all back to those good old-fashioned basics. And usually what happens is, because the original church was called Church of Christ, and they had an apologetic argument for that, they will say, we’re trying to get back to what the Apostolic Church that was in the book of Acts in the New Testament. You don’t see there; it doesn’t say Catholic Church. It doesn’t say Methodist Church or Presbyterian Church. It says Church of Christ or Church of God. And so, all of these churches tend to get, to recover that original name, Church of Christ, which is the name that the Church was organized for in April 6, 1830.
John 2:41 So, in addition to the Whitmerite Church of Christ, Sidney Rigdon, again, when he goes back to Pittsburgh, and reorganizes his church, they make a newspaper. The newspaper’s name is the Messenger and Advocate. So, the Messenger and Advocate is the old name of the newspaper from Kirtland. Now, originally it is the Latter-Day Saint Messenger and Advocate, but after a few issues, it becomes Messenger and Advocate of the Church of Christ.
John 2:41 So, what’s happened? They’ve peeled back another layer. Sidney Rigdon, and the others in his organization have decided, it was a mistake when we changed the name of the church from Church of Christ to Church of the Latter Day Saints, which happened right before Zion’s Camp. And so now they also don’t like the compromised Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And so now they’ve rolled it back, again, to Church of Christ. And so, ultimately, as Sidney Rigdon rolls back, peels back the onion, he gets to the part that was important to him before his Church of Christ merged with Joseph Smith’s Church of Christ, which is this having all things in common, living together out on a farm, this communitarian experiment that was taking place in Kirtland and Mentor, [Ohio] prior to all of those important early members, combining their church with Joseph Smith’s Church of Christ. And the headquarters being actually absorbed, Joseph Smith’s Church being absorbed by Sidney Rigdon’s church and moving to Kirtland and so forth. And so now Sidney Rigdon does that again. So, they created a farm. They all try to live all things in common. Again, that totally doesn’t work, which it usually doesn’t. Once you get property all messed up, you have to be very intentional, and you’ve got to have a lot of people that are really committed in order to make living with all things in common work. So, essentially, that causes Sidney Rigdon’s church to atomize and so it’s gone.
GT 04:40 I saw that one time it was called The Church of Jesus Christ of the Children of Zion.
John 04:43 Okay, so there’s another Rigdonite church. And so, in the same way that David Whitmer has a church that is a McLellin church in his name, so, Sidney Rigdon, late in life, has a correspondence church that is [led by] Stephen [Post]. And so Stephen [Post] is essentially, who has been a Strangite and he’s done other things. So Steven [Post], has his own church in Iowa and later Canada. And more or less for legitimacy, he is writing to Sidney Rigdon, who is then giving him all kinds of encouragement and offices and instructions and things like that. But Sidney Rigdon is still living in New York, in his son’s attic, or whatever he’s doing. And so he’s not actually associated with this church, but it’s kind of like a correspondence church, where it’s a Rigdonite church in the sense that it’s getting legitimation from Rigdon. And so that church is extinct. It’s an interesting church.
GT 06:05 And so that’s different from the Bickertonites, because Bickerton took over Sidney’s church.
John 06:09 Yeah, it’s a different Rigdonite church, and in this case, it’s one that’s extinct. So the one that’s in Pittsburgh, like you say, Bickerton reorganizes that church after 1853 and that continues to this day as the Church of Jesus Christ, which we call, like you say, the Bickertonites. And so that’s one of the extant branches, and it’s actually one of the [larger groups.] It has about 10,000 members or so. So it’s one of the larger ones. And it’s also interesting, because it’s the only one that hasn’t existed in the shadow of either the LDS Church or the RLDS church. Because they’re off in Pennsylvania, doing their own thing. There’s a little stone that was cut out of the wall, without hands, and is rolling and is going to one day, envelop the whole earth. And when you go and talk to those guys, they’re too busy being the one and only true church to have bothered too much with what us Community of Christ-ers and what you Mormons are doing. (Chuckling) Because they’re busy. They’re great.
GT 07:13 (Chuckling) I’m hoping to visit their church, this winter, so we’ll see.
John 07:18 That will be fun. They’ll keep you on your toes, they’re great. So then another one that I’m listing here is Warren Parrish’s church. And so, after the banking debacle, when the bank in Kirtland, Ohio goes bankrupt, again, like I say, when you get property involved, that’s a mess. So, all of these people had put all of their [earnings into the bank,] anybody who had property, the members of the Kirtland High Council and so forth, put their money into it, and then the bank failed, despite prophecies to the contrary. I mean, the members didn’t know how to make a bank. Anyway, it ended up causing a bunch of dissension, and bankruptcies, too. As a result, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, lose control of the Church in Kirtland. The Church in Kirtland excommunicates them. It continues to exist, and it’s decides, again, it’s purifying. So, it decides, when did we met mess up? When we started that bank. So Joseph Smith was definitely a fallen prophet when he started that bank. But then they decided it he was also wrong to have led Zion’s camp, to have changed the name of the Church. So again, the name of the Church becomes Church of Christ. So they go back to the old name. When they changed the revelations, when the original revelations, as published in the Book of Commandments were heavily edited, when it became the book of Doctrine and Covenants, that was a point that lots of people who are the purification guys don’t like. Again, when we changed the high priesthood, when we organized the Church, even. What they end up deciding at this point is, in the Warren Parrish group, is that Joseph Smith was never a prophet, and that the Book of Mormon is false. And so, once they get to that point, then Martin Harris, who is a member of this church, he was on board with rolling things back a long way. But Martin Harris has a very powerful testimony of the Book of Mormon, and so he leaves at this point. And so, the Church, essentially, onions itself out of existence. It turns out if you pull back all the layers of an onion, there’s nothing in the middle. And so that’s kind of what happens to a lot of these churches is they can’t find a natural new place to stick.
GT 09:36 So, I was going to ask you another question about David Whitmer. So, he would have been totally cool with Hiram Page?
John 09:43 So, Hiram Page is his brother-in-law, right?
GT 09:50 Is he? Oh, I didn’t realize that.
John 09:51 So, essentially, I think all the witnesses that are not Smiths are Whitmers in the sense that Oliver Cowdery is also Whitmer’s brother-in-law. So, essentially, the Whitmerites are the Whitmer family, and so I’m trying to think if Hiram Page or if it’s somebody else, so by the end, when they reorganize the church, I don’t think Hiram Page is [alive.] He might be dead. I don’t know if he’s part of it. But in any event, people in that family are there and they are cool with different people getting revelations. I don’t know how [David might have reacted.] David Whitmer might have liked Hiram Page’s revelations at the time. That was part of the problem was that some people liked it. And so, the problem was, on the one hand that it contradicted Joseph Smith. It was a rival source of authority. And the fact is that a lot of people were thinking that they were legit. In other words, [these revelations] were just as legit as anything Joseph Smith was doing. And so, therefore, maybe David Whitmer would have been one of those. Yeah.
GT 10:57 Okay, cool. Okay.
Preservation Groups: Young/Wight/Cutler
John 10:59 So preservation, Joseph restored the fullness of the gospel. He was the prophet. We’re here to just simply guard the flock until his return. So, in the case of Alphaeus Cutler and Lyman Wight, who we’ve talked about already in Manti, Iowa, and in Zodiac, Texas, and other Texas colonies, respectively. Cutler and Wight, I think don’t actually make leadership claims of their own. In other words, they are simply princes of the Council of 50, who were building up their own kingdoms and so forth. They are waiting till the end without saying, “I’m the successor,” or anything like that. In other words, they’ve got roles that have been given to them from the Council of 50: Lyman Wight to establish colonies of refuge in Texas; Alphaeus Cutler, again, claims he’s got this special commission to act in terms of the kingdom, preserving the kingdom in the Council of Seven, according to him. But he also had a special Indian mission that was also part of what the Cutlerites were doing in in the Nebraska-Kansas area. Anyway, they’re both kind of doing their own thing.
John 12:15 Likewise, I would say that Brigham Young is, actually, largely in this camp, which is to say he is not actively changing everything. The main thing that Brigham Young does and why I’ve made this orange here is that he takes things that had been the secret practices in inner Nauvoo, the high Nauvoo theology and temple practices and sealing, the endowment and so on, and brings those to everybody. So, now, it’s not just a secret [among] people in the know who were to practice polygamy. That’s pretty much everybody. In other words, that’s going to be what the Church is about under Brigham Young. He’s not as interested in the very last thing. So, the Council of 50, I don’t think he has a particular sense of what this kingdom stuff was going to be and so he continues to organize, or he calls the Council of 50 a couple times with himself in charge. But, it isn’t ever central to what he is doing going forward. And so in general, Brigham Young is not mostly adding. He does have some of his own ideas. For example, Adam-God, but it may well be that that is just his attempt to make sense of some of Joseph Smith’s last theological speculation about the nature of God and so forth.
GT 13:44 Okay. Do you think Joseph’s taught Adam-God or was just Brigham?
John 13:49 Well, I think that Joseph definitely taught [something like that.] Even the couplet of the eternal progression, plan of salvation theology is not necessarily something that he actually said; “As [man is] God [once was. As] God is man may [become.] I mean, he did say in the King Follet discourse, “Look. I’ll tell you the great secret. Look, in that yonder Heaven,” or whatever. “God that is there was once a man,” or something like that. So, the critical part of his progression theology, which is that God or the rather that the Heavenly Father is not God in a traditional Abrahamic religions’ monotheism kind of way, which is to say eternally omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and so forth, the one in a monistic sense. Because God can’t be that, if God is increasing in glory, because it’s impossible to have infinity plus one. It’s not possible for that to be eternal if God at one point was a man, right? So in other words, a rejection of monotheism is native to Joseph Smith.
John 15:14 So, then I think that in terms of the idea that Adam is our God, I think that’s Brigham Young’s understanding of it and making sense of it. And I don’t know if Joseph Smith said something that stuck that in his head, or if he made it up, himself. But I don’t think that Joseph Smith taught that. I don’t know how much Brigham Young went out on his own on that or whether it’s just his trying to make sense of Joseph’s teaching, more likely.
John 15:43 Like I say, Strang actually has his own really interesting take on this, which is embracing progression theology, and embracing the total distinctiveness of the persons of God in the Trinity. In other words, that the Father is an entirely separate being from the Son [who] is an entirely separate, being from the [Holy] Spirit, Strang keeps all of that. But he reasserts that the Father is God in a monotheistic sense, and that Jesus is, in fact, the first human who became exalted and became a god, as opposed to the One God. And, that set into play the plan of exaltation where humans can also become gods like Christ. Obviously, there’s a distinction there between the one eternal, omnipotent, omniscient God, but you can become still divine in that other separate sense. And so, essentially, that is a re-embrace of the early Christological position among early Christians in the first and second, third centuries of adoption-ism, where, essentially, Christ is not God, but is adopted by God to be a divine son or something like that. In other words, that’s what adoption is. Right?
GT 17:19 Yeah, I was surprised when Bill Shepard told me he thought that Jesus was the biological son of Joseph. I was like, “Wow!”
John 17:27 Yeah, yeah.
GT 17:28 Because you don’t hear that very often.
Jonathan 17:29 Yeah. That’s different from–so, Strang’s understanding of that is different from Brigham Young’s. Because Brigham Young’s speculation is that Jesus is the biological child of whoever the Heavenly Father is, Adam, who is also God.
GT 17:50 Yeah, right.
John 17:52 Interesting. Yeah. Anyway, and then Joseph, III, doesn’t have time for any of that. And just goes back to saying, “No.” In other words, we’re good with the Trinity. No one understands it. There’s reasons we don’t get rid of it.
Strang/Thompson/Morris Innovation
John 18:15 Okay, so preservation and then finally innovation. And so there’s a hymn in the Nauvoo hymnal, “The Church Without a Prophet Is Not a Church For Me.” In that time period between Joseph Smith’s death and the reorganization of Brigham Young’s First Presidency, when the Twelve are acting without a First Presidency, or as the First Presidency of the Brighamite faction, Strangite missionaries follow along the Pioneer Trail, singing “The Church Without a Prophet Is Not a Church For Me.” That’s one of their forays into doing their missionary work, trying to convert, what becomes Brighamites to Strang. Right?
John 19:00 And so, Strang has new scripture, new revelations, new doctrines, and so forth. He has new plates. His new plates have new witnesses. Those evolve into new scripture. One of the things that’s amazing, when you go and visit the Strangites, is you realize how much, despite the fact that there have been many apostolic successors to Joseph Smith through Brigham Young, and how they have all had the title, prophet, seer and revelator, including all of the apostles have had that title. Many of them have been the president of the Church. Nevertheless, none of them have had the kind of prophetic imprint on the LDS tradition that the Prophet Joseph Smith has had. And so, I always even say, if I say “the prophet George,” you don’t immediately jump to George Albert Smith, necessarily, because nobody is thought of in that kind of way, the way the Prophet Joseph is thought. You really get the sense of that when you go to Strangite church, because they literally have two prophets.
GT 20:12 Joseph Smith and James Strang.
John 20:13 And the second one, the Prophet James did as much as the Prophet Joseph, because like I said, he actually fixes progression theology. He translates an entire additional book of scripture. So, there’s, the fourth standard work, which is to say, The Book of the Law. The Book of the Law, it’s so Mormon. It brings this path, this trajectory that Mormonism has been on, where the Old Testament times are actually understood to be Christian, is all kind of brought back together in the same way that all of these Lamanites and especially the Nephites were kind of proto-Christians, way before Christ, in the many centuries before Christ. The Book of the Law explains that the ancient Israelites also were in the same way, because when the Ten Commandments are actually restored, they include “Do unto others.” So, the golden rule is actually one of the Ten Commandments, but it was just simply lost, because that plain and precious things had been taken out of the Bible. And so, the covenant is actually more or less just renewed as opposed to ever different. So, it’s always been the same as it’s been retro-jected by Strang into biblical Old Testament times. And so, it’s really interesting stuff. They have definitely two prophets.
GT 21:48 Yeah. Well, and you’ve got Charles Thompson on there. I’m trying to remember and maybe I’m getting my names mixed up. One of James Strang’s wives dressed up as a man. I thought she went by the name. I thought it was Charlie Thompson. Do you remember?
John 22:08 No, what’s his name? Charlie Douglas.
GT 22:14 It’s not Thompson.
John 22:15 Charlie Douglas, that’s Strang’s wife.
GT 22:17 Okay. Was it Elvira or was it a different wife? Do you remember?
John 22:22 Eliza,[1] and the reason why I know…
GT 22:25 Okay, so Eliza was Charlie Douglas?
John 22:27 Charlie Douglas was Eliza. And so the reason why I know that is actually here in Canada, we have a member, Eliza Smith, who is a direct descendant of Strang and Eliza.
GT 22:29 Oh really?
John 22:29 Yeah, so most all of the Strangites ended up joining the Reorganization. So, the reason why there’s so few Strangites today is because Strang didn’t appoint a successor. The existing people who have stayed in the movement have done so without having additional prophetic leadership. They’re waiting for another prophet, but they have never had one. And so, as a result, they were easy prey to Reorganized missionaries/Josephite missionaries. Actually, Strang had even said that Joseph, III, would one day be a prophet. And so, there were a lot of reasons why most of them all joined. There are no Strang descendants in the Strangite Church, just like there are no Cutlerite descendants in the Cutlerite Church. But I have lots of friends who are actually descended from Cutlerites, in the Community of Christ. And same thing, who were descendants of Cutler, in addition to Cutlerites. And there’s also descendants, of course, of Lyman Wight and also of James Strang in the Reorganization. The Reorganization pulled the majority of all the non-Brighamite groups together.
John 23:53 So, Charles Thompson is a different guy. He also has his own revelations and things like that. So, he’s known as Banimi, and he has this oracle. He gets everybody to move to western Iowa, where they’re going to have a communitarian settlement. He gets everybody to essentially sign over all their property to him. But then everybody gets very angry with his leadership and they want their money back and so they sue him and so forth, and the whole thing collapses. And so, most of the Thompsonites who stay in the church also end up joining the Reorganization, then. It collapses in 1858. And the Reorganization really takes off in 1860.
John 24:39 Then, likewise, Joseph Morris, then is a convert who claims the prophetic gift in Utah. And so, he starts to issue his own prophecies and things like that. He becomes, not a major challenger, but a bit of a mess for the regular/mainline Brighamite Church, because again, this is something that is the idea of new prophecy, new revelation and things like that. This is something that’s really absent from what’s happening in Utah. In other words, that’s not the apostolic-led structure that’s happening. And so people who are attracted to that start gathering around him. And so that becomes the Church of the Firstborn, the Morrisites. Where are they? Weber? Anyway, they’re in Ogden or something like that. And so they gathered.
GT 25:39 Are they?
John 25:40 They gathered there, and they have their own homestead or a fort and things like that. The Mormon militia attacks them and massacres them. And so, most of them don’t make it. And some of them, though, survive as refugees. One of the apostles, Mark Forscutt ends up joining the Reorganization and becomes an important member of the church leadership who’s involved with a lot of the hymnity. So, he made one of our really important hymnals in the late 19th century. But others of them scattered. They’re going to go to Montana, and they go to Walla Walla, Washington, in the Northwest and things like that. The Morrissite groups continue into the 1960s, when they go extinct. The group in Walla Walla is kind of famous because the leader there prophesied that–I’m trying to think of how the order of it is. [The leader said] that that Jesus was going to be reborn again and prophesied of his son. So, when his wife has a baby that kid is then understood by the community to be Jesus. So, he’s called, the Walla Walla Jesus is what people call him or whatever. And then the next one with, for the next kid I think it’s that God the Father is going to be born. And so, the little brother I think, is God the Father, or something like that. So, anyway, it’s kind of a crazy, tragic story. I don’t think that kids lived to adulthood. But, anyway, the Morrissites are extinct now. But the point of it was new prophecies, new innovation, that kind of thing.
GT 27:27 Do they tie in with Strang at all then? Or they’re just new innovators?
John 27:30 No, no. The Morrissites are from the Brighamite tradition. So, they’re coming out of that. Thompson probably had been a Strangite, if I’m remembering right. So, at a certain point, the original big groups were originally the Twelve-ites, the 12 [apostles] before Brigham Young reorganizes and becomes the Brighamites, and then the Rigdonites. But Rigdon’s church and movement collapses fairly early. And so then the big two groups are Strangites and Brighamites. And so, at some point or other, most people will have had an affiliation with one group or the other, although some people claim at least that they held aloof, like Emma and her sons, and maybe [Granville] Hedrick. Although, I think it’s completely possible that Hedrick had been semi-affiliated with Strangites, and then later the Brighamites, maybe. But anyway, they’re their own independent branch with continuity back to the early church, anyway.
GT 28:34 Okay. There’s another polygamous group called Church of the Firstborn. Is that Fred Collier? I can’t remember.
John 28:40 Well, it’s a name that’s in Scripture. And so people, sometimes some of these have echoes. So, since that’s somewhere in the tradition, it’s a name that people latch on to. So, it’s very common to have Churches of Christ of course, or Church of Jesus Christ.
GT 28:58 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
John 29:01 Lots of the churches, the Strangite Church today is called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. People sometimes then keep attaching more words onto that like Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Pentecostal Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. But then, sometimes people get creative: Jehovah’s Presbytery of Zion.[2] That’s great.
GT 29:30 That is definitely original. I would not recognize that as a Mormon church.
Rigdonites
Jonathan 29:35 Right. Okay, so we’ve talked a lot about these already, but I’m just going to try these out a little bit. So I would just call these as, when we’re talking about all the different groups, they’re divided broadly into all the churches that emerged before Joseph Smith’s death, and then all the ones that have emerged from Joseph Smith’s death onward. All of the churches from before Joseph Smith’s death are extinct. The Hinkle-ites and all those kinds of guys, William Law’s Reformed Mormon Church. Those don’t continue to exist, Warren Parrish’s church and so forth, none of that.
John 30:12 But in order, then, of when they reorganize presidencies, groups that continue to exist are the Rigdonites, the Strangites, the Brighamites, the Cutlerites, Josephites where Joseph is Joseph III, not Joseph, Jr. and Hedrickites. Then there are other groups that are also extinct. And so, we’ve talked about a lot of those, like the Wightites and the Whitmerites. So, Rigdonites, we’ve already talked about a bunch of these. So, on the first place, after, then, the Nauvoo church with Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Hyrum Smith as the First Presidency. From that group, Sidney Rigdon relocates to Pittsburgh. The Hinkle-ites, actually, and William Law’s church kind of affiliate with Sidney Rigdon. Like I say, Sidney Rigdon’s church sort of becomes the main opposition group to Brigham Young and the Twelve. So anybody who doesn’t like them kind of says, “Okay, well, we’ll make common cause with Sidney Rigdon.” And so he kind of absorbs them all up.
John 31:17 As we mentioned, his Church totally unravels because of their both unpeeling the onion and not deciding where to go. And when they decide where to go, it’s to have all things in common, which doesn’t work. And so, Sidney Rigdon’s church organization, there’s branches that continue to meet. One of his very last apostles that he has called in his structure, William Bickerton, is a leader of one of the congregations and then when Brigham Young and James Strang have both publicly announced that they [practiced polygamy, Bickerton leaves LDS Church.] So, Brigham Young had always been publicly denying that they practiced polygamy. James Strang had initially been a major opponent of polygamy, before he embraced it openly.
John 32:02 At that point, William Bickerton reorganizes the Rigdonite Church, as the Church of Jesus Christ, which continues to this day. I might not even have the most recent leader of the Twelve. But they’re led by, then, a Council of Twelve. They pull back to–I’ve got this blue, but it’s kind of like a blue-green. [They are] an early kind of Kirtland-style church, because they have apostles, but they have eliminated other kinds of offices, like First Presidency, things that are not biblical. And they are also among the churches, for example, that agree with David Whitmer, that changes to the Book of Commandments revelations were wrong. So, they don’t like the Doctrine & Covenants. They don’t consider that to be part of their [canon.] They’re the kind of church that does everything by the Spirit, as it’s called. In other words, in the same way that LDS people, Brighamites, generally speaking, will not do a pre-written prayer, and then just read a prayer, you tend to pray from the spirit or whatever. In other words, orally composing your prayer as you speak, but you will tend to write down a talk. You tend to write the talk down and read a talk at church.
John 33:17 So they don’t believe in writing the talks down. So, you’ve got to give the talks the same way that you give prayers, which is by the Spirit. I’ve been to the church. You’re going to have fun when you go there. They also often don’t believe in writing a bulletin down. In other words, the presider of the service will, by the Spirit, decide what’s the next thing. They’ll say, “Brother, Rick, do you feel called to come up now and give a talk on tithing?” He might give you the topic. He might not. And then you’re kind of like, “Yeah, I do. I do feel called to do that.” So, you’ve got to get up and give a talk on tithing.
GT 33:55 They wouldn’t have a non-member do that, would they?
Jonathan 33:58 Well, I was scared that they were going to when I was there, at a certain point, because I had never been in a service like this. Everybody kept on getting called to do things, including musical numbers and all this. And I’m like, “Oh my goodness.” Because it very much kept me on my toes more than any normal church services. A lot of restoration churches are good at making very boring services. And I’m going to say that my view of the LDS Church is pretty high on that list. But that is not true for the Church of Jesus Christ. You are on your toes. You don’t know how long this is going to last. You don’t know what’s going to happen next, to my view, anyway. So I was concerned that they were going to call on me and I was like, “Well, what am I going to say? What am I going to say?” Because I’m kind of a planner. I don’t like to [speak extemporaneously.] Anyway, they didn’t call on me. But it was a very vigorous and spirit led [meeting.] They’ve had an interesting thing. So, in the last generation, I think the lady just passed away, but a member of the church actually received by revelation an entire hymnal.
GT 35:09 Arlene Buffington.
John 35:10 Yeah, so they have their own hymnal that is in a kind of more contemporary style, just filled with church-distinctive hymns that are really brand new. And so, it’s really amazing in that way. Then they have some of the Kirtland-era practices like feet-washing that other people don’t do. So, it’s a very interesting group. And, like I say, they’re off on their own, the one and only true church. They don’t have time for the rest of us.
GT 35:41 Don’t call them Mormons.
Jonathan 35:42 There is a lot of work to do. The neatest thing that happened, though–yeah, don’t call them Mormons. But the neatest thing that’s happened to them recently is that for the very first time–the Community of Christ tradition is substantial, in the sense of much bigger than this. Right? And has also had its own university. In other words, as of the third prophet of the church, actually had a Ph.D. So, in other words, they have had educated people, and have produced its own historians and so forth. The LDS Church, of course, has all kinds of people with Ph.D.’s and its own historians and things like that. This is the very first time any of the other groups has had a native son be able to be trained in history academically, has a Ph.D. in history, and now has produced this William Bickerton biography, and hopefully now, more histories of the church. It’s just amazingly good. So there’s lots of exciting things happening with the Church of Jesus Christ.
GT 36:45 Yeah, Daniel Stone you’re talking about. He’s awesome.
John 36:48 Daniel Stone, yeah, he’s amazing.
Brighamites
John 36:50 Okay, so Brighamites. Where are we? So, obviously, like I say, the way I’ve kind of distinguished this, so I’m doing circles here. I’m just throwing different stages. I’m trying to do this, because I’m trying to avoid saying that different groups schisms are break-offs. Right? So everybody, in a sense, has continuity going back, at some line or other and how they got there. And so, obviously, there is a mainline bulk of all of the membership here that is going from Joseph, Sidney Rigdon, and Hyrum as a first presidency in Nauvoo, to the Twelve, who were leading the Church that had recordings of their church in Kanesville, at Council Bluffs, the Winter Quarters and so on, to the new First Presidency that’s reorganized with Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, and Willard Richards, with the new headquarters in Salt Lake. And that continues onward. And we’ll see the future ones.
John 37:46 And so then I’m, from there, pulling when there’s additional divisions. And so, I have Joseph Morris here off of the Brigham Young-era church. That’s one of those we already talked about, the Morrisites. Another church that emerged during the Brigham Young period is another kind of intellectual and more, let’s say, it’s not progressive, but progressive, broadly saying on the left, break-off or new expression that emerged from the Brigham Young era church was led by William Godbe. And so, essentially, these are people who want to make Mormonism more respectable, and who want to get rid of some of what they see as the more backward practices and things like that, and they are prepared to make common cause with the non-Mormon community, the Salt Lake Tribune-type people in the Deseret territory, the Utah territory and so forth. But it doesn’t have a lot of legs. It doesn’t really go anywhere.
John 38:48 I also mentioned on this chart here, where from the Twelve, how the Cutlerites and the Wightites are not in favor of that reorganization with Brigham Young in their First Presidency. And so, they’re together in that kind of interregnum period, but then have left. And then I’m also putting on here, we already talked a little bit of that Council of Seven, that Council of Friends, this idea that while in hiding from the U.S. Federal government, while the U.S. Federal government is massively cracking down on the LDS Church in order to try to break both the Utah theocracy and also, more especially, polygamy, that John Taylor is in hiding receiving revelations like God sort of saying, “How can I end a new and everlasting covenant?” So the celestial or plural marriage is a new and everlasting covenant. And so how can I revoke an everlasting covenant? So, the idea of it is in the fundamentalist tradition, that Taylor sets aside certain people, that if the Church, as he would say, goes into apostasy, if it fails to keep the principle alive, that certain priesthood members outside of the Church will be able to be called to continue to have the practice. And so that is that break, and it has Lorin Woolley there and the Council of Friends, in that sense, before Wilford Woodruff and the Manifesto, the first Manifesto.
GT 40:21 Okay.
John 40:23 Okay. And then that takes us, then, from Lorin Woolley, and then others. This is just a basic overview of the earlier fundamentalist-Mormon split. And so there’s its own group are the LeBarons. The LeBarons have their own line that they trace it back. They’re not part of that John Taylor part, but they’re an old, traditional group that is one of the main fundamentalist groups, even though they don’t come from the same, exact [history.] They don’t draw their history the same way. But out of that council, there are several main strains. So, the most famous one that people are aware of, like you say, is the Short Creek group, which has become the FLDS Church under Warren Jeffs, whose numbers are quite down, as you were pointing out, because of all of the craziness of his administration. So, what I’m doing here is showing, again, circle ones on the chart are historic iterations, of which now there are these kind of current ones that are in stars. So, Warren Jeffs is still leading an FLDS group that’s a rough group. And there’s several groups that have emerged from that. So, there’s the Centennial Park group, which was named for the settlement that’s just south of Short Creek. There’s the Blackmore group, which is the Canadian former FLDS group.
GT 41:57 Does that go through LeBaron? Because it shows you going through LeBaron for those.
John 42:01 No, the LeBarons are their own line at the top. So, you can see it’s a separated line. So the Church of the Firstborn is that area.
GT 42:11 I see, I’m following a different line, okay.
John 42:13 And the Lorin Woolley group, the Council of Friends has these three major branches which are the AUB, the FLDS, and then the Kingston group. And so, those have continued. So, the AUB, the Apostolic United Brethren is the biggest one of those at this point. And so that’s the group that, at the Point of the Mountain, has that kind of big [building.] I don’t know if it’s a temple, maybe it is.
GT 42:44 I don’t know where it is. Because it’s in, like, Bluffdale. And they say it’s an endowment house. The temple is actually in Mexico they said.
John 42:52 There’s a temple in Mexico. Right. So, okay, then that’s an endowment house. Anyway, there’s a big, it looks like a multipurpose building, a stake center or something like that. I mean, the Mormon Church has been making stake centers into temples, too. When I was a kid, I went to the multipurpose building in Manhattan. And that’s a temple now. Right? Anyway, so maybe it’s a temple. Anyway, whatever it is, I’ve been to that building, and I’ve been to church there. And so, it is amazing, because it’s kind of huge, and you get a huge number of people coming to that.
GT 43:24 I want to know where it is. I’m not sure where it is. Do you know roughly where it is?
John 43:29 I’m sure I could find it just using Google. We could find the address of it. But I mean, I’m sure you could find it using Google Maps by looking at it. It is a very stark looking building. It’s not pretty. There’s my architecture part here. You guys have a big church. Build a pretty temple. Anyway, this is what I advocate for everybody. So, yeah, so the AUB is probably the biggest, then, at this point. But then the Kingstons maybe are the richest. I don’t know. So, I don’t really know the details. Anyway, there’s a bunch of different fundamentalist groups that are now not all in communion with each other.
GT 44:17 Are the Kingstons in the Manti area? Is that right?
John 44:22 So, I don’t really know where everybody is. I have to tell you that I am more familiar with all of the other groups than I am with Brighamites. And so, this is kind of, I don’t actually, I haven’t actually been around. I mean, I’ve been to Short Creek several times and I’ve met with ex-FLDS people a lot. I’ve talked to Blackmore. I’ve been to the headquarters of the TLC Church in Manti. I have not met with the Kingstons and so I don’t know them. I’ve been to the AUB endowment house in Bluffdale, or wherever it is. In other words, I’ve been to a bunch of it, but I don’t know all of these as well as I know, for example, the Cutlerites, the Hedrickites, the Bickertonites and the Strangites, especially. Anyway, not everybody [is represented on the chart.] There are always new fundamentalists or, in other words, new people who, like the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ in Manti, TLC church, True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days. What ends up happening, a lot of times, is if you come with the premise that Brigham Young and John Taylor, and so on, are all prophets, just like Joseph Smith is and that the things that they preach are revelation from God, then you can get into a lot of danger if you read what they said. So, what can happen is that let’s say you have a study group in Utah, and you get ahold of the Journal of Discourses and you just start reading Brigham Young speeches and so forth. Then suddenly, you get acquainted with doctrines like Adam-God. You get acquainted with other Mormon fundamentals that have been abandoned by later Church presidents and so forth. And among those is polygamy that they are pretty serious about. That is the defining thing that they’re not intending to give up and so forth. And so, it doesn’t take that long. And when you’re having a study group, like that, it’s quite dangerous. As I say, you’re potentially two or three months away from being in a different church and having your wife be married to your friend, who’s the new leader and that kind of a thing. In other words, that kind of thing happens a fair amount, and so there’s new ones that can be formed all the time from the LDS Church, directly as opposed…
GT 46:52 Would the Peterson group be a break off of Rulon Allred? Would you say?
John 47:00 So, remind me of that. I’m trying to think which one the Peterson group is?
GT 47:04 That’s Christ’s Church.
John 47:08 Right. Yes. Yeah. So I think that they are, right? So I think that they’re pulling it out of that. And I know members of that in the 70s. They’ve been very active in Sunstone, and things like that. And when I made this chart, I made this way before that happened. And they are the ones with the pyramid temple. And so, they’re a very interesting group, and I need to put them on the chart. And I apologize to the members of the Peterson group church that I haven’t put you on this chart. I’m going to, I promise, for the next one. All right. Anyway, there are so many more that you could do, because obviously, the Brighamite group is the biggest.
John 47:53 So I’ll just also mention that we should be also bringing in–the Church is now International, right? And so there are all kinds of, you know, like, technically, maybe more members of the Restoration now live outside of the United States than inside the United States. But the international Church gets ignored so much. But, in fact, actually, in places, for example, like Mexico, it has been very well established. And there was a group in the 20th century called the Third Convention, that broke for a time with the LDS Church. In other words, it had been members of the LDS Church, but were upset with an American centric, US centric leadership and other upset over, we had local control and so forth. Most of those people or half of those people moved back into the LDS Church, but a whole bunch of them also stayed. They affiliated, instead, then with the AUB, and then we were talking about how the AUB has a temple in Mexico. That’s because this group was down there and so that nucleus of the Third Convention became part of the AUB. There’s been other groups that emerge from the left. So, Antonio Feliz and the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ in the 80s and 90s, created, essentially, a gay church. So, for Mormons, gay men who were discriminated against in the LDS Church and still would be, they created their own church structure. That doesn’t exist, anymore. Actually, lots of the people who have been in leadership of that have either sometimes flirted with, sometimes joined and are now members in Community of Christ. But, for a while, they had a couple of congregations and were functioning. And then, the biggest thing that has emerged, actually, since I first made this presentation is the Remnant Fellowships movement, so Denver Snuffer and associated groups who are not a left wing movement, but what it is, is an anti-corporate movement. And so, as the LDS Church has continued to correlate and has continued to be more and more centrally controlled and maybe more organized in terms of a more, anyway, as opposed to, people remembering, anyway, let’s say the more roadshow-ey–Mormonism made by Mormons, and then also wanting individual spiritual gifts, even, that Hiram Page-y kind of stuff where everybody’s receiving their own revelation. I think the Remnant Fellowship movement appeals to people who want to have that more local spiritualism and dynamism and that kind of a sense. And so, it’s actually spread kind of pretty substantially, although not huge, compared to the people who continue to be part of the main institution.
Strangites
John 51:06 So, as I mentioned, we have priesthood, the restoration of priesthood, the restoration of church, the restoration of Kingdom, in 1829, 1830, and then 1844, respectively. So, the Strangites are among the people who were serious about the kingdom part. Strang, himself, emulates Joseph Smith, who is, at the end of his life, King of the Kingdom of God on earth. Strang similarly takes that title, but he does so much more theatrically. He’s actually–it has involved a ceremony. He has an actual coronation ceremony and so forth. So, he’s much more famous as a king, than Joseph Smith. But anyway, the kingdom is something that was made quite literal, by James Strang on Beaver Island. James Strang, like Joseph Smith, was also assassinated or martyred. And so different Strangite groups emerged both before and after that. William Smith, who had initially tried to become the Presiding Patriarch over the Church in Nauvoo and was recognized as patriarch by Brigham Young, to the Church, not Patriarch of the Church. William Smith wanted Patriarch over the Church. He, later, Brigham Young breaks with him and says, “You’re a patriarch of nothing. Get out of here.” So, when William Smith has to flee Nauvoo, he later writes to Strang and says, “Hey, maybe I’m patriarch over your church.” James Strang is like, “You are Patriarch of the Church.” So, anyway, he’s Patriarch of the Church for a while, but then William Smith, who has been secretly practicing polygamy, gets in trouble with Strang who was an anti-polygamist originally. So, he [William Smith] then gets kicked out of the church. He founds his own church. Then William Smith gets in trouble, because he’s also secretly practicing polygamy in his own church. He gets caught, and then his own church kicks him out for that.
John 52:00 So, one of William Smith’s apostles, Jason Briggs, then has a revelation that we have to stop following all these factional leaders. We have to wait for Joseph Smith’s son to emerge,and receive a calling and grow up enough to become the President of the Church. And so in that sense, William Smith’s church, which is headquartered in a settlement called Palestine Grove, which later is replaced when the railroads come through by a town called Amboy. It’s later in April 6, in Amboy, that the first Conference of the Reorganization happens, and it’s no coincidence that it happens at William Smith’s old church headquarters. In other words, that’s where the nucleus of that reorganization group happens. Meanwhile, I had already mentioned the Thompsonites. So, Thompson also had been a Strangite before he became a prophet, himself, and led those people to Iowa and tried to get a hold of all their property. Meanwhile, George J. Adams, who had been a Williamite and later stayed with Strang, was one of the presidents of Strang’s Council of Elders. He’s the guy who was a former actor and had been in the theater in Boston and so forth. He’s the one who arranged the the coronation ceremony. After Strang’s death, he ends up reorganizing his own faction of the church in Maine, where he convinces everybody that they need to go and physically restore old Israel. So they build, like, a bunch of prefabricated Maine houses, which they load onto a boat. They take to the Ottoman Empire. They land in Jaffa. They create what’s called the American Colony in Jaffa, and they almost all starve to death. They were not expecting what Palestine, now Israel, is like climate-wise and they weren’t ready for any of this. This is a subject of a Mark Twain story called Innocents Abroad, where he goes and he finds these, essentially, what he considers to be deluded Adamsite/Strangite Mormons living in the Ottoman Empire in Palestine. He narrates. Mark Twain is satirical about religious fervor. He had things to say about the Book of Mormon, as you know, as well, and the Book of Mormon witnesses. Everybody loves the chloroform in print line. But my favorite line is, when he was looking at the list of witnesses, he says, “I couldn’t be more satisfied and at rest, with the testimony of the witnesses, had the entire Whitmer family testified.”
John 56:03 In other words, those witnesses, he’s totally on board with this witness list. (Chuckling) Anyway, Mark Twain also encounters, though, these Adams-ites. And so, most of the Adams-ites, again, are ultimately gathered into the Reorganization. The Reorganization actually has Palestine branches in the 20th century, including a school in Jerusalem, and there’s still a historic site, the house that they have in Jaffa, and now Tel Aviv. So, it’s essentially one of the things that actually did precipitate a literal gathering, to that zone. And, I’ve actually had here at Toronto, in my congregation here in downtown Toronto, in Centre Place, I’ve actually had a rabbi come and say, “Is this church (Community of Christ) the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints?”
John 57:03 And I said, “Yes.”
John 57:05 And he says, “So, I wanted to come and thank you because of the Jaffa colony.”
John 57:15 So I was like, “Yeah.”
John 57:17 He’s like, “Do you know that story?”
John 57:18 And I’m like, “Yeah, I know that story. I’m surprised you know that story.” So it was a very interesting experience. But yeah, in addition to the Mark Twain book, there’s some books about, essentially, Latter Day Saints in Palestine, in Israel, because of that experience. So, just one of the interesting, quirky stories. Then what ends up happening is the main group that stayed in the Strangite church, were led by one of the remaining apostles, Lorenzo Hickey. Hickey had two things going against him as the leader. So, Strang, in his book of scripture, The Book of the Law of the Lord, because his rival is Brigham Young and the Twelve, Strang makes it very clear in the law, the restored Ten Commandments and the rest of the Levitical law and everything like that. He says, “The Twelve have no authority to appoint a prophet.” In other words, if the prophet dies, if the Twelve tried to appoint a prophet, that would be apostasy, because the lesser office cannot appoint a greater office. If you run out of elders in your congregation, the priest can’t appoint a new elder. And so Strang says that very clearly. So, all of Strang’s apostles look around and they say, “Well, we don’t have any authority to appoint a new leader.” And then Lorenzo Hickey tells a really crazy story, where he says Strang, when Joseph, III, was a boy, Strang went to his house in Nauvoo, crept in the window, ordained him to be his successor and left. And so, as a result of this [story], most of the Strangites end up joining the Reorganization. But some of them, including Hickey, and then, another major disciple, Wingfield Watson, continue to be true to Strang. Because Joseph Smith, III, even though he accepted all the Strangites into the church, into the Reorganization, he did not retroactively legitimize Strang. Strang is a factional leader who led people astray. So, none of his stuff made it in to the Reorganization. People who were true to everything Strang did, have continued to this day. There’s, effectively, one strong congregation back in Wisconsin now in Burlington, Wisconsin/Voree. And then there’s scattered Strangites in addition to that. And they continue to be a very living, dynamic group. They can convert new people, and so I think they’re unlike the Cutlerites, who are kind of on life support. They could go on indefinitely, because they really have been just about this size for over a century.
GT 59:59 It seems like there’s–well, John Hajicek is an independent Strangite, and then there’s Alexei Mattonovic, I think that’s his name.
John 1:00:12 Yes.
GT 1:00:12 So, he claims to be a Strangite apostle, which kind of flies in the face of, “There’s no more apostles.” Right?
John 1:00:19 Right. So, yeah, there’s independents and then neo-Strangites. In other words, people who like Strang’s stuff and who have decided that they’re either the church or that they’re the true successor and not the Strangite Church. In other words, this is new. Other Strangite groups, or individuals, really, and there’s one, West, who was in correspondence with some people in Africa, and has met with them. I think he’s gone over there a couple of times. So, one of the things that can also happen in Africa is that once there’s a local congregation that is Christian, and then also affiliated with the Restoration, they can sometimes do headquarters shopping. And so they’ll call up the RLDS Church/Community of Christ and say, “Hey, if you support us, we’ll be your congregation here in Kenya,” or something. And, they’ll also call up the Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and say the same thing or the Strangite Church. And so, there was a sense, at a certain point, and at least claimed that there were significantly more, let’s say, African Strangites, than there are part of the mainline Strangite Church, based on activities of independent Strangite leaders who were in communication with African churches. So, I don’t really know. It’s hard to say in those kinds of cases, how much that identity has held in any of the African congregations, for example.
GT 1:01:58 Well, that’s interesting.
Cutlerites
John 1:02:00 Cutlerites. So, the Cutlerites also had the unfortunate thing of having Josephite missionaries find them. So, almost everybody, including Cutler’s descendants ended up in Iowa, ended up joining into the Reorganization. But there was one group under Chauncey Whiting, who said, “Okay, we’ve got to get away from these Reorganites. We’ve got to get away from these Josephites. And so he had a vision to go and settle the church in Minnesota. So, they go up to the frontier. Minnesota has just had a massive Indian uprising. And so, they go to a part of the place where there aren’t any settlers, and they create their new headquarters there. And they live there. And they’re doing all the kind of Cutlerite stuff, which includes a Nauvoo-era endowment, and it also includes a united order kind of thing, so, sharing property. And so, they go up and relive what they were had been doing in Iowa there. But the problem is, then the, RLDS Church finds them up there, too. And so, again, they lose half the people, as they all start joining the Reorganization. Some of the people that are left decide that they need to gather back to Independence. And so for a while, there’s essentially two congregations, one in Minnesota and one in Missouri. And for a time, they’re not really on full speaking terms. And so I draw them here as different. But, eventually, they kind of go together and/or the Minnesota branch dies out. So, they’re now left with– and actually I’ve got to replace who’s the leader here. But, anyway, they’re now left with just a handful of people that are in the Cutlerite headquarters that is just south of where the temple lot is in Independence.
GT 1:04:07 Right. Right. Yeah.
John 1:04:09 And I always say there’s actually more Mormon grad students camped around the Cutlerite compound than there are Cutlerites, because there’s so many people who are obsessed with finding out what the Cutlerites do in terms of the Nauvoo-era endowment or whatever the Cutlerite endowment is like, and the Cutlerites won’t tell them. And so, anything that’s a secret, people want to know.
GT 1:04:33 There’s only like 10 to 12 of them left.
John 1:04:35 Right, exactly, or less even. I always tell people, there’s so many other really interesting groups and you should go study one of them, because there’s a lot of people studying Cutlerites. But, certainly, they’re an interesting group.
GT 1:04:54 I think the youngest Cutlerite is in his 30s. So, they’re probably going to be around for a while, especially if he continues on.
John 1:05:02 Yes, well, they could–in other words, they can last indefinitely, because they’ve been very small for a long time. So, like you say, if the youngest one is in his 30s, if he marries and he has kids and they stay in the church, there you go. You’re another generation.
GT 1:05:17 Most of them are pretty old, though.
John 1:05:19 Yeah, so part of the problem is when you have shared church property, letting somebody in is a problem. Right? Because, at a certain point, it might be a person who’s coming in to have access to the property or whatever. Anyway, so this is complicated when you have been a church that has been burned a few times, when you have had new converts. So, this is a problem that the Cutlerites have, for example, that the Strangites don’t have. So, the Strangites are able to have lots of new converts and invite people in who are interested in being part of their community, without having to have this extra layer of sharing property together. Okay, let’s get to the next one here. There, did that slide change?
GT 1:06:27 It did, yeah.
Evolution of LDS/RLDS Temple Practices
John 1:06:28 So, I make this diagram to show the evolution of Temple practices in the LDS tradition. So, in Kirtland, that area in the church is set aside for, in the lower court as assembly worship. Above that is education. And on the top floor is headquarters. So, there isn’t actually–Mormons who come to the Kirtland Temple, say, “Well, where’s the baptismal font? Where are the…” They imagine that the upper rooms in the attic are used for an endowment, but the Nauvoo endowment. It, obviously, hadn’t been created yet. And so there’s a difference in the structure, although we still have that same structure in Nauvoo, which is a little odd of having essentially two courts on top of each other–in the original Nauvoo Temple, not in the replica. There’s only one court in the new temple. But, in the original it would have been…
GT 1:07:26 Oh, there is a court? I don’t remember seeing the court in the new temple.
John 1:07:29 Yeah, there is for assembly worship, it’s in the first floor. It’s smaller. So it’s not a full size. So, the original one, it would have just been, almost all of the real estate in it would have been taken up for the same kind of thing, like in Kirtland where, it would just have been that lower court and upper court, which would, again, for assembly worship and education. And so the difference of it is that there’s a mezzanine level, because the Nauvoo Temple is so much bigger, that there’s a mezzanine level and that’s where the offices are. So, that’s the headquarters offices that had been in the attic of the Kirtland Temple. And then in the basement, they have now, a font with the oxen and so forth in Nauvoo. And then there is a space set aside for endowment rooms and so forth, and also rooms for sealing, up in the attic. Essentially, the Nauvoo Temple, then, has both that Kirtland stuff and the things that LDS people associate most with temples now. And some of that is true in the Salt Lake Temple, where they still have one of those big assembly [rooms.] They don’t have the education [room.] They don’t have a second one of those. Lots more space is given over to the endowment and sealing, and so forth, section. Whereas, if you get to, like kind of a standard planned temple, one of the little ones, obviously, they don’t have an assembly [room.]
GT 1:07:56 What you call an endowment house. (Chuckling)
John 1:08:17 I was calling it an endowment house, (Chuckling) because I don’t see that as being a significant enough building and it doesn’t have all the things that a temple needs. But, anyway, but you can see why…
GT 1:09:15 The newer temples like there’s a new coming here in Saratoga Springs, probably in the springtime they’ll l have an open house, I’m guessing. And it would be kind of–I mean, it’s big. It’s as big as like the Mt. Timpanogos temple. I guess we’re getting rid of all the cafeterias. We don’t have that anymore. And I hear there’s only one [font.] I hear Salt Lake is going to have two baptismal fonts. Saratoga has only got one, I know that, or at least that’s what I’ve heard. I haven’t been in it yet. But, it’s just like the small, standard 21st century LDS temples in the fact that there’s no really assembly worship, and that sort of thing.
John 1:09:57 That’s not even being used anymore, right? So, in other words, even though there is one of those in the Washington D.C. temple, how often is that used? And it’s a big room.
GT 1:10:07 I’ve heard anecdotally that sometimes they’ll have zone conferences for missions in the temple, like the D.C. temple. But I honestly don’t know how often it’s used, but I mean, D.C., Salt Lake. I mean, those are pretty much–apparently Nauvoo.
John 1:10:29 I mean, there’s one in St. George.
GT 1:10:30 Those are the only ones with assembly [rooms.] St. George. Okay. But I’ve never heard anybody meeting in the St. George. So I mean, maybe, I don’t know.
John 1:10:40 I don’t know. I think they probably gutted it. The Logan temple, they got rid of the entire colonial interior in the 1970s. Pioneer, not colonial, pioneer, anyway. I don’t know. And it’s very scary the renovations.
GT 1:10:55 I still think in Salt Lake, because they’re, apparently, gutting the inside. They’ve got already gutted the inside. I’m sure they’re still going to have, well, I’m pretty sure, I don’t know. They’re going to have a big assembly room for like the Seventies and things, but I don’t think the general public is going to be able to meet there.
John 1:11:15 Yeah, well, I don’t want to go down the path of my feelings about historic preservation of priceless…
GT 1:11:24 Well, you’re no longer LDS, so you can you can get away with it. You’re not going to get excommunicated or something for that.
John 1:11:29 I know. Okay, look, if a building, like the Provo Tabernacle burns down, okay, that’s fine. Rebuild it that way. But if you’re going to gut these historic buildings that are just– for the heritage…
GT 1:11:48 Iconic.
John 1:11:48 Yeah, I mean, it’s crazy. Alright. So, anyway, from the same beginning, the Reorganization very deliberately, when we talk about peeling back an onion, Joseph, III, is very clearly trying to recover the old Latter Day Saint-ism of Kirtland by kind of deciding that Nauvoo and the Nauvoo innovations are not what he was interested in. We need to get back to that time period when we had, as a movement, our greatest success. Which is to say, at the Kirtland Temple dedication, this amazing outpouring of the Spirit, when we’re all singing The Spirit of God together. And so, indeed, then, the temple in Independence, the Community of Christ Temple, the idea of it is it shares those same components with the Kirtland Temple, without those Nauvoo innovations, which were left behind. Which is why, then, if you were to go again to the Independence temple, an LDS person goes through, and they won’t see anything that would be familiar to them about a temple. Again, if you had been Community of Christ and gone to the open house of the Missouri temple in Clay County, up there, you wouldn’t see anything that is resembling Kirtland or the Community of Christ understanding. Because, like you say, it’s just these other parts of it that are not part of the same tradition.
GT 1:11:49 Yeah, and John Whitmer [Association Conference] was there in the Independence temple, just a couple of months ago. So that was a lot of fun. I didn’t realize there were so many classrooms in there.
John 1:13:39 Yeah, yeah. So the goal of it was, again, that the temple school would be there. So, in the same way that there had been the School of the Prophets, the School of the Apostles, the school in the Kirtland High School was held in the Kirtland Temple. The temple school is part of the thing that was established with the Community of Christ Temple, as well as the history department, the archives and library and now, the Community of Christ seminary also meets there where seminary here is meant in the kind of a regular Christian sense, as opposed to the Mormon sense of the program for teenagers. It’s, actually, the graduate program in religious studies and ministry and so forth. And so yeah, all of those things, and church headquarters. So, all the offices of all the church leaders are there, too. And so it’s replicating what the temple was used for in Kirtland.
John 1:14:35 We’ve talked already about the Wighties and the Whitmerites who are extinct. One of the things that had happened in leading up to the Reorganization in 1860 is that Lyman Wight had died, James Strang had been martyred. Charles Thompson’s church dissolved in recriminations. And Zadoc Brooks’ church in Kirtland had dissolved. Alphaeus Cutler was still alive, but he was in incredibly poor shape. He wasn’t mobile anymore. He’d already been much older, a generation older than Joseph Smith, and so on. And, by the end, he was probably, like addicted to lanolin, and so forth, as a lot of people were. That had become a medicine. And so, he was not able to actually actively do anything. He had become immobile, and not able to move around and so forth by the time 1860 rolled around.
Josephites
John 1:14:00 So really only Brigham Young’s organization had survived and was going really, really strong by 1860. And so one of the major successes of what Joseph, III, was able to do was to gather in so many of the previous organizations, the Cutlerites, the Wightites, the Strangites, the Thompsonites, and so forth, including some Morrisites and some Brighamites, and especially the people who, for example, hadn’t stayed in Utah, but in fact, went on to San Bernardino or who had been in San Bernardino and didn’t want to leave when Brigham Young said, “You’re not allowed to stay in California.” So that became a center of the Reorganization and so forth, when Joseph, III, emerged as a second prophet/president of the Reorganized Church.
John 1:16:22 And so, that has continued. We mentioned Joseph, III’s son, Fred M. Smith, had a Ph.D. And so it was that interest that the Smith family had in education. Joseph Jr. was a not well-educated person but was interested in education and wanted to be a lifelong learner. He created the schools in Kirtland and tried to learn Hebrew and all those sorts of things. Josephites have had their own schisms within the Joseph, III, tradition. So, one of the ones here in Toronto is R.C. Evans. He’s a Canadian. He’d been a member of the RLDS First Presidency. He believed that Joseph, III, was going to name him to be the successor and not his son, Fred M. Smith. And R.C. Evans was pretty much the greatest orator of the Restoration, probably period. The congregation would rent out the biggest theaters in Toronto, so 7000 seats, 7000 people, and R.C. Evans would fill it up. And so he was just an amazingly successful preacher.
John 1:17:42 After Fred M. took over, he groused a lot. And at a certain point, they had a leadership conflict here. And R.C. Evans walked out of the congregation and took at least a third of the people with him, and started his own church called the Church of the Christian Brotherhood. That lived on until the 60s or 70s, when both of the remaining congregations sold the buildings and merged back into Community of Christ. Another major connection was when Fred M. Smith was asserting that he had supreme directional control over the church. There had been a lot of power vested in the Presiding Bishopric, a lot of power vested in the Council of Twelve Apostles and Fred M. Smith wanted to say, “I’m the President of the Church and the head of the First Presidency. We have supreme directional control of the Church. That caused a big dispute. A thousand people transferred their membership from the RLDS Church, at the time, to the Temple Lot Church. And so that’s shown there as the “See Hedrickites” line. So, in fact, the Hedrickite Church only had had maybe 60 or 80 members at that time, its character changed massively when a thousand disgruntled RLDS people suddenly joined. And so, it has a tradition that has, in fact, been quite connected to the Josephite tradition, as a result, even though they have their own independent line going back.
John 1:19:13 But the most significant and most recent thing is in the 80s, when traditionalist RLDS people left affiliation with the mainline church in their branches or reorganized their branches as independent Restoration branches, some of which are just met independently and continue to meet independently as congregations or branches. But some of which have joined together either to form the Remnant Church of Jesus Christ, the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ, and then groupings of branches, the Conference of Restoration Branches, the Conference of Restoration Elders. And so, essentially, it’s a group of fundamentalist RLDS, but for RLDS fundamentalists, of which we call Restorationists. There’s a family of that, of which there are some emerging church, or fully existing church organizations, but some of which don’t have church organizations. And then, of course, the mainline of the church, the Reorganized Church, in the year 2001, changed its name to Community of Christ.
GT 1:20:29 And the one I see missing there is Jim Vun Cannon. He broke off with Terry Patience’s with the Everlasting Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Days.
Hedrickites
John 1:20:42 So, yeah, I can’t put them all on. But, yeah, I should put more on, because more you have, the funner it is. (Chuckling) Speaking of all kinds of fun groups, the Hedrickites. So, as I mentioned…
GT 1:20:59 This is good. Yeah, I like the Fettingites. I’m trying to get somebody on from there. I’ve been holding out. I don’t like to do Zoom, but I may have to.
John 1:21:10 Yeah, they are an interesting group. Essentially, what ends up happening is the Hedrickites move to recover the temple lot, and they have a little bit of a break, in the meantime. But then they came back together, and they are, essentially, one little congregation that owns a little part of the temple lot, that is, essentially, across the street from RLDS headquarters by the 1920s. And they have ceased to have apostles. They’re essentially functioning as a congregation and the RLDS Church has a secret plot that’s not too secret, to absorb them and make them be one little RLDS congregation. So, the RLDS Church has made a deal with them, that they mutually recognize each other’s priesthood, and that and that the members could transfer their membership back and forth. In other words, so that they can kind of start to recognize the Hedrickite Church as just one little congregation within the Reorganization.
John 1:22:13 But, then, like I say, supreme directional control happens, a thousand RLDS people transfer their membership, and then that instantly creates a vibrant Hedrickite Church, which calls all new apostles, 11 of the 12 of which are former, are ex-RLDS. And so it sets a new a new trajectory. So that causes schism within it. So, they try to build a temple. Different people, Otto Fetting starts getting visited by a messenger, later revealed to be John the Baptist, who tells them that they need to build a temple. And so, they dig a big foundation pit and they’re getting ready. They’re trying to do it. But one of the things that the messenger, eventually, tells them all is that they have to be re-baptized because of the problematic, RLDS baptisms that they were mostly all functioning other. So, rebaptism is a big no-no in the Reorganization tradition. One of the claims that the Reorganized Church always had that it was the real church was that when Brigham Young brought his members of his faction into Utah, he forced them all to get re-baptized and the RLDS claim was that’s because it’s a new church, whereas none of the people ever had to get rebaptized into the RLDS Church, because they were recognized as members, based on their original baptism into the early church. Because the RLDS Church is the same church as the original church. Anyway, that’s the pretense or whatever of the thing. But that made it so not getting re-baptized was a big no-no for a lot of RLDS people. They just thought that was a sign that you’re not the real church. And so, when the messenger told them all they had to get re-baptized, that caused a split again. Eventually, Fetting, actually, is one of the ones that’s kicked out. And so, then that becomes, like you say, the Fettingite branches, which have, then, continued to break apart and evolve.
GT 1:24:04 I can’t believe how many times those have split. Holy cow. That’s crazy.
John 1:24:07 Yeah. So there’s the Narron kind of group that went off and has, essentially, split between the different Gaymon brothers here, the Church of Christ at Halley’s Bluff, and then Dan Gaymon’s group, which has sort of rejected Restoration backgrounds has become a white identity church. So, it is really crazy far right at this point. There are Fettingite Churches, two of them, that reject additional messages by William Draves. William Draves’ groups, The Church with the Elijah Message, have also split. There used to be three, I think there’s now two left remaining Churches of Christ with the Elijah Message. And so then there’s other, probably other ones as well. But, essentially, those have all gone in a lot of directions. The mainline continues to hold the temple lot. And so that would be the Temple Lot Church that we all can visit whenever we go to Independence and go across the street from the temple or the auditorium. It’s right there in the middle.
John 1:25:10 And they also, though, one of the churches that emerged from that group was the church led by Pauline Hancock, which is called the Basement Church, because they had a building that they hadn’t built the top on yet, right? So, they built the basement first and they’re getting ready to build the rest. That’s has the distinction on the first hand of being the first Latter Day Saint tradition church, as far as I’m aware of, anyway, that was led by a woman. She, again, was one of those ex-RLDS people who’d left over supreme directional control and is now the head of her own independent Hedrickite or Latter Day Saint denomination. And then that church is the church where the Tanners met. And so, they are the ones holding those cottage meetings and so forth. They are really interested in early document studying and so, essentially, the whole program of the Tanners of modern microfilm, where they’re going back and studying the early texts and things like that. That’s something that the Hancock Church, the basement church was kind of all doing. And then part of their study, ultimately, was that they ended up deciding that the Book of Mormon, actually, that they’ve rejected the Book of Mormon’s, historicity and so forth. And so then, as a church, they voted to de-canonize it. And then as they went further, and did further study, they ultimately rejected kind of all restoration distinctives and other things, and they voted to disband as a church. And so that church has the distinction, also, of going so far to the left that they voted themselves out of existence. But I put on here, also, even though it’s not part of the Restoration tradition, and it isn’t particularly an actual break-off, I’m making it in gray here to show that the Utah Lighthouse Ministry, in a sense, owes some of its distinctives–it’s obviously an evangelical Christian church, that’s not Restoration. But it obviously is in communication with the Restoration.
GT 1:27:09 Right, right. So, was it Eugene? There’s that thing there. Was it Pauline Hancock that voted themselves out or was it Eugene Wilcox?
John 1:27:23 I think he would have been the leader by the time–I think she might have been dead by the time they voted themselves out of existence. So, I think that the idea of it is, is that Eugene Wilcox is the leader of the group when they decide to disband. So, circles mean that the group is gone. So, the little stars are, that’s like referring to the existing groups.
GT 1:27:50 And then Sandra, I guess she’s shutting down her ministry. I don’t know if you’ve heard that. Have you heard that?
John 1:27:55 I hadn’t heard that. But I mean, I can imagine. I mean, she’s done a lot of work for a lot of time. And you know, at a certain point unless there’s a successor, you know?
GT 1:28:06 Yeah, I don’t think there’s going to be a successor. So, she’s basically retiring this spring is what I hear. And then that’s going to be no more.
John 1:28:14 Well, then I’ll put that, I’ll make that a circle instead of a star when that [happens.]
GT 1:28:20 She’s still alive.
John 1:28:21 It doesn’t mean you’ve died. It means that the organization isn’t functioning or has moved on to successors that are on the chart still. So, anyway, I was going to show this before when I started talking about the Temple Lot Church, but anyway, there’s the Temple Lot today. The lighter green area is the original temple parcel. And so even though the Temple Lot Church, we sometimes think of that area is the temple lot. That’s simply the traditional spot of where the temple, the first of the temples was maybe going to be put. The temple parcel is…
GT 1:28:56 The first of the 24.
John 1:28:57 Yeah, yeah, exactly. The first of the 24 temples. The temple parcel, in general, includes where the LDS Visitor Center is, and a whole big field that the LDS Church owns, not up to where the stake center is. The stake center is off the temple lot. The Community of Christ Temple and the auditorium and the auditorium’s parking lot are also on there, as is our U.N. Peace Memorial. I always feel like the Community of Christ made a memorial to the U.N. on the temple lot simply to get back at that town in Utah that seceded from the U.N. {chuckles}
John 1:29:39 But, actually, it’s because Harry Truman is from Independence, and he announced the formation of the U.N., actually in the Auditorium. And so that’s a historic monument for that reason. The Stone Church, which is a historic RLDS chapel, is off the temple lot. So it’s on the other side of the street from the temple lot. And so if we take, again, the temple lot as that light green area, if we go to the 1833 plat, the original temple plat that they drew up in in Kirtland. And if you try to kind of place, if you assume the traditional spot for the first of the temples is correct, which it may not be, and if you assume the kind of the mark on this plat is where that one is, then that’s how you would overlay the actual plat on the actual temple parcel. Essentially, where the Temple Lot Church is, where the LDS Visitor Center is, where the auditorium is, and where the Community of Christ Temple is overlaps with where some of these temples would be.
GT 1:30:30 So, some of those are where the Stone church is, though, right, those three temples there?
John 1:30:32 That’s true. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. So the Stone church is not on the parcel, but it’s actually it is where the temples were supposed to go. But likewise, what part of the issue is that, even though that was the more famous plat, the original plat that they drew up in Kirtland, the people in Missouri said, “Well, wait a second, there’s a hill here that you’re maybe not taking into account, like where the LDS Visitor Center and the auditorium is, there’s a big slope. And so do you really want to have all these temples on the downside of the slope and so forth? And so they wrote back and said, “Why don’t we orient it this way, and make a plat that is actually four times as big.” And so the second plat that was actually drawn up in Missouri, by the Missouri church leadership, would have reoriented this way. In any event, the temple lot is still kind of covering the area where the temple lot is, the Stone church, the temple, the auditorium the LDS Visitor Center and so forth. So anyway, so that’s how it looks today with the remnant churches headquarters, not the not the remnant movement. This is the Josephite remnant church. The Hedrickite church headquarters, the U.N. Peace [Plaza] was, the Stone Church, the Auditorium, the [Community of Christ] temple, the LDS Visitor Center, and the LDS stake center. Like I say, the Cutlerite Church is just a few blocks south. And there’s actually a bunch of other headquarters all around Independence. Independence is lots of fun for that.
GT 1:32:07 Well, and that Remnant Church headquarters used to be a high school, Crisman High School, I think it was called.
John 1:32:12 That’s right.
GT 1:32:13 And then I was talking to somebody at Whitmer conference, and he was wearing a Crisman High School shirt.
John 1:32:24 There are a lot of [people.] I’ve got a lot of old Community of Christ friends who graduated from Crisman High School, and so their using that. They definitely…
GT 1:32:32 And then it became a junior high, apparently, after that. And then the Remnant Church bought it, after was a junior high. It says High School on the building.
John 1:32:39 And it’s just their headquarters because it’s by the temple lot. But they actually have developments that are further east in Jackson County. So, they have a conference center and a development, I think, that are not there, but this is where the offices are because of proximity to the temple lot.
Succession Theories Trapped in 1844
John 1:33:02 Just to wrap up, a couple of things. One of the things that ended up happening is, in my view, because of the results of the succession crisis, is that the succession theories, how you argued for legitimacy, ended up trapping, or potentially trapping the different traditions in 1844. So, because, in order to legitimize his claim that he should have been the leader, Brigham Young, who was the senior most apostle and he opposed, as his main rival, Sidney Rigdon, the last surviving member of the First Presidency, in practice, therefore, the senior most apostle automatically succeeds to leadership of the LDS Church when the prophet dies. It’s said, then, that the First Presidency dissolves. That’s a very formalized ritual practice that happens in the Utah LDS Church, even though there’s nothing that says the First Presidency dissolves. It’s just another way to retroactively delegitimize Sidney Rigdon. Needless to say, gerontocracy results, having a system where you have to wait through–there’s actually 15 apostles. So, when you have to wait through the 14 people in front of you to die, then, even if you are one of the people who was ordained relatively young, like Thomas Monson, by the time that he actually got to be the church president, he was quite old. And the prophet today is 98, right? And so, having the leader in his 90s has been, actually, a pretty common situation since the 60s and 70s. So, certainly 80s and 90s is the norm.
John 1:34:59 Likewise, James Strang. James Strang claimed he was appointed successor by Joseph Smith. He claimed he had a letter to that effect. He claimed that he was ordained by angels. He opposed Brigham Young and the apostles, who claimed that the apostles should lead the church. And, indeed, he wrote into, or in other words, not wrote into, if you want it from the Strangite perspective, new revelation when you read the actual Book of the Law, the brass plates that Nephi went back to get from Laban. When he translates those into English and they become this fourth book of scripture that the Strangites have, the Book of the Law, they say on it, very clearly, that the apostles don’t have that power. So, as a result of that, the apostles are not authorized. So, when Strang is martyred, they’re not authorized. Strang failed, or declined to appoint a successor, so there is not appointed successor. And so far, angels have not showed up to appoint the new successor to the Strangite Church. And, as a result, there is no successor. So, as a result, the person who is the leader, is the high priest who is elected to that position by the Strangite conference, essentially. So, that has continued, where they do not have anybody who is at the level of apostle or First Presidency, because they have an ongoing line of high priests and so they can appoint new high priests, but they can’t appoint anybody higher than that. So that’s where the Strangites are.
John 1:36:34 Likewise, then, Joseph, III, where he’s the son of the predecessor. He, obviously, also opposed the apostles as the successors. So, he was definitely clear on making the First Presidency different from the apostles. It’s its own independent council or quorum. But Joseph Smith, III, himself, always emphasized that he was the president, really not be lineage, the way that William Smith had promoted, but rather, because his father had appointed him to be his successor. And he as prophet had clarified how that would work and created his own letters of counsel about how succession would work, especially involving who the prophet appoints. This is one of the reasons why R.C. Evans really thought he was going to get appointed. Because here he is the best speaker in the Church. He was a more experienced leader, and so on and so forth. He had been in the First Presidency longer. Who is this little kid, Fred M. Smith to named? But in any event, what he ends up doing is appointing his son. So, even though he’s emphasizing that appointment is the issue, he appoints his son and so it stays in the family all the way up until the 1990s. Indeed the last Smith prophet, Wallace B. Smith is still alive, and continues to be emeritus prophet of the Community of Christ. Although then he decided, or he said that God was no longer calling Smiths to be the prophet. So, he called Grant McMurray to be the prophet. So Grant McMurray succeeded by appointment.
John 1:38:17 But then, the Community of Christ had the uncomfortable problematic issue where, we already don’t have Smith family prophets, and now Grant McMurray resigned without naming a successor. So, how do you have a leader now when you’re stuck in your 1844 succession crisis? So, what ends up happening is that the First Presidency didn’t dissolve. The First Presidency continued to exist. They didn’t have a president anymore, but it did have the other two members. As they were temporarily leading in a pro tempore system, they said we will have a churchwide discernment process so that we can all as a church pray who God is calling to lead the church. That ultimately focused in practice on the Council of Twelve and the person who was president of the Council of Twelve Steve Veazey ended up being the next president of the Church. There are a lot of LDS people who say, “What a second! That sounds familiar!” {chuckles}
GT 1:39:20 That happened in the Remnant Church, too. Terry Patience was the President of the Quorum of the Twelve.
John 1:39:29 Yeah, it is kind of [similar,] but the difference here was that the President of the Quorum of Twelve in Community of Christ tradition is not the senior most member. In fact, actually, Stephen Veazey was one of the younger apostles. Even though he’d been elected, so the Twelve elect their own president, and it’s not based on who’s oldest or anything like that. Anyway, so right now, the in the next World Conference, for example, the current President of the Twelve, Ron Harmon, has been called to be the Presiding Bishop of the Church. So, he is going to leave Twelve and enter the Presiding Bishopric. So, when that happens, and the two new apostles are called–one of the other apostles is retiring, and then when the two new apostles are called, then there’s a ritual where they then vote, during that same conference. They vote together on who the next President of the Twelve will be. And so, it doesn’t have to be the senior most member. And so, the question that we have in Community of Christ going forward, and this is a completely open question is, what’s going to happen going forward?
John 1:40:42 So, Steve Veazey has been around a long enough time, and he’s now gotten to retirement age. He’s like, 66, or 65, something like that. And so, he’s at a time when he probably will be announcing if not this conference, the next conference three years from now, his retirement. But we don’t really have a window, yet, into how the succession is going to happen. And so, part of the issue is, I think he’s very unlikely, although it’s completely possible, to go back to picking Smiths. So, a Smith prophet/president could completely happen. We have an excellent Smith leader right now, who could be the leader, Lach Mackay. So, that would be an example of going back to that.
GT 1:41:32 Oh, that would be awesome. I love Lach. He’s awesome.
John 1:41:35 I’m totally on board with it. It’d be fine with me. Anyway, so that’s certainly a possibility. So, that would probably involve both appointment and going back to Smith. That’s unlikely, probably. I don’t know. I’m not saying–I don’t have odds on this. It’s completely– there’s no–I’m just speculating. There’s been no indications. Another thing though, it could be that it just goes back to just appointing people. But I guess what I would argue, in the same way that we’re seeing here that how the practices retroactively legitimize the successor, and so the predecessor, so, the way that the LDS Church continues to have succession, which is totally fixed now, and I don’t think is probably open to change. I mean, they might, eventually, decide to start making themselves emeritus, but it seems very hard to imagine that they’re going to. But, anyway, they might do that. But in the meantime, it legitimates Brigham Young, because they’re doing it in the same fashion. What I would suggest is, we’re to a place now for Steve Veazey, in order to say that that discernment process, this thing where we were saying the entire church was praying, “Who is God calling us to be the leader of the church?” Who is God calling? We’re all acting as a prophetic people in order to manifest that revelatory impulse. I think in order to retroactively legitimize that process, that for Steve Veazey, that going forward, actually, we should be becoming less of a constitutional monarchy and more of a constitutional republic. Which is to say, where the prophet and president is elected by the World Conference of Community of Christ, to serve, let’s say, a six-year term or something like that. Anyway, that’s just my own thoughts. That is not like, the church is not saying that. There is nobody in the church who has said anything. You heard it here first, guys.
GT 1:43:42 There you go. I do know there’s a rumor going around that the next prophet will be a woman. Have you heard that rumor?
John 1:43:49 Well, I would say that everybody in the church is ready for that. And so, I think that, for example, that would be a problem…
GT 1:43:59 So, Pauline Hancock wouldn’t be the last one. Right?
John 1:44:02 Right. Absolutely. That would be a problem with getting a Smith in the person of Lach, in that he is an American white guy. So, I think that the church members are ready to have a prophet/president who is a woman, so our first female prophet/president. And so, obviously, a person like Stacey Graham would be an obvious [choice.] She’s been the Presiding Bishop and she’s been an apostle. She’s been in the First Presidency. So, she would be an obvious candidate to be Steve Veazey’s successor. It seems to me we’re in a place where–so when you’re on the College of Cardinals in Rome, and the Pope has either just recently abdicated or he has died, there is an enormous desire on the part of you as a cardinal to call somebody who’s Italian. Because you’re all Italians, and you want the Italians to be in charge. And that’s why that’s happened most of the time for hundreds of years, right? But, but there is amazing pressure from the rest of the church to have it not be an Italian guy. And they’re all going to be a guy, but it would be nice not to have an Italian, right? And so that’s why I actually predicted they would pick Francis, because all the people in Argentina are Italians, including Francis. So, he’s technically from South America, but he’s an Italian South American. And so that’s why I’m like, I know they’re going to pick him and they did. But I think that in that same way, I think there would be pretty significant disappointment.
John 1:45:46 I think Lach can skirt the needle on this because of him being a Smith. But I think that, for example, if let’s say Ron Harmon right, he’s the President of the Twelve. He’s the incoming Presiding Bishopric. He’s a young, dynamic, a great leader and everything like that, but he’s a white American guy. And so I think that if he was named as the successor and it’s just an appointment, I think that that would be disappointing for a lot of the people. Certainly, as we become a more consciously global church that is trying not to be American-focused and headquarters focused. Right? So, there is a majority, for the very first time, in the incoming Council of the Twelve Apostles, only half male, half women and non-binary and then it is minority American, majority international, counting Canada as international, which we do, we do count. So there. (Chuckling)
RLDS World Conference in April 2023
GT 1:47:00 (Chuckling) So are you saying this will happen at the next general conference, or the one three years down the road?
GT 1:47:04 The upcoming World Conference, which is in April. We already have listed–so we don’t have any changes to the First Presidency, but we have changes to the Presiding Bishopric that have been already announced and changes to the apostles. So, like I say, the President of the Apostles…
GT 1:47:21 And Carla Long is going to be in the Presiding Bishopric, right? She lives here in Saratoga [Springs] or Eagle Mountain. I’m not sure. She’s really close to me. I need to get her on.
John 1:47:27 That’s right. Yeah. So, there’s a whole new presiding bishopric. So, Ron Harmon is the current president, and then Carla, and–all three new Presiding Bishopric [members] will be changed. And then there’s two new apostles, because one of the apostles, Barb Carter is retiring. And so, anyway, so there’s two new apostles.
GT 1:47:50 And so are you thinking about doing for like a six-year term now, instead of– because I think with Steve Veazey, it was just open ended and he served for a few years.
John 1:47:59 Yeah, we have no idea what’s going to happen. I was just proposing that there’d be a six-year term. In other words, that the Prophet/President, again, could be legitimated, not through random appointment. I mean, in other words, even if Steve Veazey is the best leader in the world, but he has concentrated, like a huge amount of power into him, actually, for a church that is moving towards being a prophetic people, a theocratic democracy, as opposed to a theocratic dictatorship. And so, the more we are moving that way, there’s still like, an amazing amount of power that is concentrated in the presidency, since Fred M. asserted supreme directional control over the church. And so, if it’s just appointment, and they can appoint anybody randomly, so you could appoint somebody and maybe they seem really great, but once they’re appointed, what is the check on their power? So, I think the situation is potentially kind of dangerous going forward if it’s simply going off on the on an appoint, appoint, appoint kind of path, as opposed to having more input, and also potentially terms. So that’s all I’m suggesting. But this will be very new to everybody’s ears, even in Community of Christ, what I’ve just said, but I’ve just been thinking about it a lot lately.
GT 1:49:28 Very cool. And so, you’re going to be the next apostle? Is that right? (Chuckling)
John 1:49:32 (Chuckling) No, we actually know who the next few apostles are. And I’m not going to be either one of them.
GT 1:49:44 Oh, have they already announced that?
John 1:49:46 Yes.
GT 1:49:48 Okay, okay. Well, very cool. Evan Sharley invited me to come to a World Conference. And I’m like, that’s really tempting. I might have to come. Is that in Independence?
John 1:50:09 Yeah, Independence in April. It’s going to be really interesting stuff. There’s going to be a lot going on in this conference. And it’s the first time we’ve done it for four years. And lots of people will be there. Evan is going to be there. I’ll be there. We’re going to have a whole big crowd. So, it’ll be fun.
GT 1:50:21 All right. So, obviously I won’t get the vote on that. But it still sounds like a lot of fun.
John 1:50:28 Yeah, well, the way it works is, so the people who are there for voting are actually elected delegates. So, unlike in the LDS General Conference, where just anybody who has a ticket, or however it is you go in there, and everybody watching via satellite, and so forth votes in terms of affirming, or, those opposed, occasionally, but mostly not. In this case, the conference is actually like parliament in the sense that it’s technically sovereign. And so, the World Conference is made up of delegates from the various mission centers all around the church. And so Canada has two mission centers, and my mission center can send something like 70 delegates. There’s a lot of delegates, anyway. And so I’ll be a delegate
GT 1:51:15 And a mission center is like a stake kind of, basically, right?
John 1:51:17 No, more like an area. So it’s kind of like–it’s hard to say it’s not quite a stake, because stakes are kind of small. So I don’t know, maybe, how many congregations in a stake?
GT 1:51:32 Four to Twelve, usually.
John 1:51:33 Yeah, so there’s 50 congregations in my mission center. So, it’s not quite the same as a stake, but it’s sort of like a stake in the sense that we’re supposed to have a council, like a High Council, though we don’t use the word high. (Chuckling) Our councils are never high. (chuckles)
Final Thoughts
John 1:52:13 All right. So that brings us all the way back to our constellation of Mormonism and where it all came from, and how it all connects together. So, hopefully, that’s been interesting.
GT 1:52:20 This is awesome, John.
John 1:52:22 Yeah, well, I really appreciated that you invited me on and that we got to go through some of these stories. And I know there’s so many more tales. And there’s so many more groups than I put on. And there’s a couple I apologize to people who are members of those groups for me not putting on your group, yet. I’ll add it to the slides next time.
GT 1:52:45 Well, this is awesome, John. Well, I’m going to definitely look forward to World Conference. Is it the same weekend as General Conference? Do you know? I hope it’s not.
John 1:52:52 It’s later, fortunately. I think it’s later in the month. I’ll have to look it up. You can type it in, Community of Christ, World Conference, 2023, and the dates come up. I think it’s like a couple of weeks after.
GT 1:53:06 I’m going to make sure I’m free that weekend. Well, awesome. What other projects–aren’t you always working on books and things like that? Or what are you working on?
John 1:53:18 Well, I am, but the biggest thing that I’m actually really [working on,] there’s two things that are kind of the biggest thing. So, my Sunday service, which is online, so the congregation here in Toronto, as a result of, actually, even before the pandemic, we had a fully hybrid service. But, as a result of the pandemic, our ministry expanded massively. And so, we’re now in a place where our Sunday service “Beyond the Walls” is the largest online ministry in Community of Christ. And so, the members of my congregation, you don’t have to live in a geographical boundary, like with a Mormon ward. You don’t have to live in Canada to be a member of the Toronto congregation. And so, members are all over the place. People are engaging, literally, all around the world. Our services every Sunday are translated into the churches, three core languages. There’s always subtitles in in English, French and Spanish, always. And so if the ministry is in French then you can be, if you’re an English speaker, you can read in the English and otherwise, any number of languages. We’ve actually had people give ministry in 40 different languages on one of our services. And so that, obviously, has emerged to take a huge proportion of my time up.
John 1:54:42 And then the other thing that I’m committed to is I have our History, Theology, Philosophy lecture series that my congregation, Toronto Centre Place sponsors on YouTube. And, so I’ve now done just hundreds of hours of lecturing. The most recent one Tuesday was on the prophetic monarchy and comparing, essentially, like those Strangites, Brighamites and Josephites prophetic traditions to the British monarchy that I’ve been thinking about since the Queen died. And doing kind of a lecture on that. But sometimes we do restoration topics, sometimes we do topics about Christian scripture, Christian history, Old Testament, everything to Greek philosophy and so forth, and everything in between. So, there’s hundreds of hours of that on that channel, which has now done pretty well. So, we have over 5 million views and so if people are interested in these kinds of topics, you can look that up on there, Centre Place TV YouTube channel.
GT 1:55:47 Yeah, I’ve attended a few of those. And they’re always interesting. How many people do you think you have per week that attend those?
John 1:55:59 The lectures?
GT 1:56:00 Yes.
John 1:56:01 So usually, live, there is going to be an audience on the cross platforms, we live stream it to both Facebook and YouTube. And so maybe, total live, it’s going to be between 150 and 200 people live. And then the most popular one of those lectures from this year was on the historical Jesus, and that one has over 100,000 views. The top of the lectures has about 500,000 views. The top 12, all are over 100,000 views each. And so, there’s a lot of people watching it. In fact, we’re at a place right now. So, this is the congregation’s channel. We’re at a place right now, where we actually have more subscribers to our YouTube channel than any church in Canada, other than the Catholic Church’s daily Mass TV. So, Catholic Church, daily Mass TV has 10 times as many subscribers as us. We’re not beating them. We’re not even close, the same way on this chart. Community of Christ is way smaller than the LDS Church. My YouTube channel is way smaller than daily Mass TV. However, I have more subscribers than any evangelical megachurch in Canada. So, we’re beating out all of those. [We have] way more [viewers] than the largest Protestant denominations in Canada, and so forth. So, we’re pretty excited about how much, between our online Sunday service and the Tuesday lecture topics, how much there’s reception of that. We feel like for Community of Christ, more people right now are being exposed through that online means like that, through this ministry to Community of Christ, than at any time in the church’s history, since the death of Joseph Smith, Jr. So, Joseph Smith, Jr. had a lot of press. But I think that in terms of the rest of the Community of Christ history, subsequently, and obviously, that Joseph Smith period is shared with the LDS Church, that we probably haven’t had this much exposure as what we’re having right now because of what people are reacting to the channel. And, so, it’s actually more than I can respond to. People are writing all the time and wanting to learn more about the church and things like that. I need missionaries. Join my church and be a missionary. (Chuckling) I’ve got a job for you.
GT 1:58:34 (Chuckling) [A job] just responding to all your emails. This is great, John. I look forward–I’m going to do my best to see you in April. And then are you going to Whitmer in September, I guess, in Texas, right?
John 1:58:50 Yeah.
GT 1:58:52 Okay. Any other plans you have for conferences, MHA?
John 1:58:57 I’ll be at Sunstone. I won’t be able to go to MHA, unfortunately. Oh, wait. MHA is going to actually be in New York. Anyway, I might be able to go to MHA. It’s, literally, like a four-hour drive. It’s hard for me not to go. Anyway, I might see you at MHA, too.
GT 1:59:16 Well, good. That’s awesome.
John 1:59:18 The problem is I have so many conference requirements. We have, like, all of these–I mean, I literally, unfortunately, ever since the beginning of the summer, when I went to–and I know that I’m not going to get a lot of people crying for me, because it was Tahiti. So, when I went to Tahiti to visit church members for a week and a half, whenever that was, in May, till just two weeks ago when I came back from visiting members of the church, I went to Sunstone U.K. and met with members in Scotland and Wales and England. I was on the road and visiting different places and conferences and things like that, like two thirds of my time and I was only one third of the time here. And so, it is draining to go to when there’s so many conferences and I love doing it. And I want to go to all of them, but it at a certain point, it’s hard to get anything done if you are continuously on the road and doing that.
GT 2:00:12 I understand that. All right. Well, any last thoughts before I let you go?
John 2:00:18 Well, no, I just want to thank you so much for the invitation. I love your podcast, I think you do such a great job of being continually positive in a universe where there’s sometimes a lot of apologetic contention, and all those kinds of things. And not everybody gets along. You’ve done an amazing job of always just being such a gracious host. And I’m sure that your audience, as a result of that, gravitates to that wonderful tone that you present.
GT 2:00:53 Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Oh, I’ll pay you later. (Chuckling) All right. Well, John Hamer, I thank you so much for being here on Gospel Tangents. Thanks a lot.
John 2:01:06 I enjoyed it so much. Bye.
[1] Charlie Douglas was Elvira Eliza Field.
[2] Charlie Thompson’s church.
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