LOL! I thought Kansas was at the Centerplace! When we lived in New York City when we were first married, mailings from the church were invariably late because they were first sent to the MANHATTEN, KANSAS mission!

Most Community of Christ churches out here on the fringes ( Southeast Kansas) are small.

So usually I just describe myself as a Latter-day Saint and that’s it. Thanks for the answer!

Thanks for reading, and no worries about going off course. You can’t have a tangent if you don’t have a center.

I would say that you’re correct: Community of Christ members would NOT call themselves Mormons (probably emphatically, for most).

I refer to members of the LDS Church as Mormons or Latter-day Saints. I realize that there was a push a few years back to phase out the word “Mormon,” but as a cultural Mormon I fear that doing so might have tragic consequences for my own identity.

OK… I’m joking. But, I do think of myself as a member of Community of Christ, a cultural Mormon, and a Latter Day Saint or Saint of the Restoration (NB the lack of a hyphen between “Latter” and “Day” which distinguishes non-Utah Latter Day Saintism from the Mormon variety). But this is just me, and I have a very unique religious experience, heritage, and conversion career.

Many Community of Christ members would like to phase out “Saints” as an word describing church members. This is similar to how many Mormons would avoid using the word “sermon” and opt for “talk”–in an act of negative-identity formation, or not because it isn’t a useful term, but because it isn’t Protestant. I, however, think “Saint” is useful and perhaps essential.

Just wondering, nothing more. I am very interested in the blog, thanks for writing!

My grandfather told me stories of being asked to contribute large sums of money–above and beyond ten-percent tithing and other offerings–for the building fund to construct local meetinghouses. This “assessment” was determined by his bishop, who would look at his income, and assess just how much he could afford to contribute. And my great uncle Paul oversaw the construction, and helped build with his own hands, a beautiful chapel that stands near the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon in Salt Lake City.

From my missionary experience, I was always surprised by the variety of buildings throughout the Southern United States–but, they had to be more than thirty years old. One chapel from the 50s featured a pulpit offset to the left of the congregation; the physical facilities manager, however, tore down the stand and pulpit, rebuilding it to look more like other LDS chapels, remarking that it was “too Protestant looking.”

I am careful in the post (but perhaps not enough) to point out that LDS building standardization is a contemporary experience of the last thirty years or so. I found a fascinating article in the November 1981 Ensign (pages 108-110) entitled “News of the Church: A New Generation of Meetinghouses.” While it lauds the new approach, many, however, lamented this cookie-cutter design.

Uniformity served several purposes. Rich members in California could no longer build meetinghouses that were more elaborate than poor members in Idaho or Utah (I’m sure you’re aware of some of the “Temple Chapels” in California, built before standardization, that are almost as elaborate as temples).

Correlation of local construction also took budgeting out of the hands of the local leadership and people, imposing more control from Salt Lake to make sure church programs and facilities were uniform. To this day, fund raising to augment the ward budget is very limited, and few members have any idea of the balances of the local budget. All tithes go to Salt Lake without any transparency, and they are distributed back as Salt Lake sees fit, again without anyone but a few local leaders knowing the numbers.

Beyond control, the obvious purpose that building standardization serves is that it saves a tremendous amount of money for a growing church. In 1970, there were 3 million members–which means that more than 10 million baptisms have been conducted in the last thirty years. By using the same design and materials, the LDS Church has saved millions upon millions of dollars over the years.

I once heard, on good authority, a story about the general authorities visiting the model chapel for all future standardized buildings. Sometime in the late 70s, early 80s, the Twelve and a few others were loaded onto a bus outside of the Church Administration building. Mark E. Peterson was grumbling about being taken away from his work, until he heard that N. Eldon Tanner of the First Presidency called for the trip.

Upon getting out of the bus and seeing the steeple to the new building–which was detached from the main building and made out of three pipes jutting out of the ground–Bruce R. McConkie stated, “That’s the ugliest steeple I’ve ever seen.” A church employee leading the tour responded, “But Elder McConkie, it saves the church $45K over a traditional steeple,” to which McConkie replied: “Like I said, the best looking steeple I’ve ever seen.”