I started last week at the beginning by asking my class the question: “How does our history begin?” Now, I was prepared for people to take this as a trick question. I thought I might get answers like “actually, since Christ founded the church, our history begins with the ministry of Jesus in Palestine,” or I thought someone might want to push back further to Eden or even the Pre-Existence. Instead, I instantly got the answer I was fishing for, “with a young man praying in a grove,” one of the class members volunteered immediately.

Exactly. This is how we today always start our story. With the “First Vision.” I next asked “What is the story of the First Vision?” and I had one of the folks write each detail on the whiteboard. The class came up with these details, which I’ll put into order: 1820s, revival meetings, confusion of sects, James 1:5, grove, prayer, vision, personage, creeds an “abomination,” don’t join any sect, found the church. The only details I had on my list that didn’t get volunteered were: “confronted by dark powers” and “pillar of light.” The class clearly knew the story from memory.

We know this story well. I next asked: How do we know it? Where does this story come from? A different class member volunteered, “It was published in the church newspaper.” Bright class! Exactly the traditional account comes from the Times and Seasons in Nauvoo in 1842. (In the LDS Church, this article has been added to a canonized booklet called the “Pearl of Great Price,” a Utah compilation that isn’t part of the Community of Christ tradition.) I had the class read selections from the account to refresh everyone’s memory, which was already pretty good except “remembering” the additional detail of a commission to found the church.

This is the story we tell when we begin to tell our overall story. This is the story we traditionally tell when we’re doing missionary work. My next question to the class was: Why are we using a version from 1842? The church had missionaries from the beginning. It had a newspaper beginning in 1832 and it published tracts and broadsides from the start. Earlier accounts of stories, by and large, are more historically accurate than later retellings. Why are we using such a late version of this pivotal story?

This time I either stumped them or they weren’t as ready to speculate, so they waited for me to supply the answer. My answer is that the earliest missionaries did not tell this story. It was not published in the church’s first newspaper. The earliest members were totally unacquainted with the “First Vision,” and during Joseph Smith’s lifetime, the story did not occupy the critical foundational place that it now occupies. (An example of this unfamiliarity is William McLellin, one of the original apostles who left the church in 1837, had no knowledge of the “First Vision,” see Stan Larson and Samuel J. Passey, eds., The William McLellin Papers, 1854-1880, xxv-xxvi.)

I then explained that although the story wasn’t widely known among members in the 1830s, earlier accounts do exist. The earliest version is from the Kirtland Letter Book and is written in Joseph Smith’s handwriting in 1832. We then read this account and noted some of the differences from the details we’d already written on the whiteboard. The 1832 account is as follows:

At about the age of twelve years my mind became seriously imprest with regard to the all importent concerns for the wellfare of my immortal Soul which led me to searching the scriptures believing as I was taught, that they contained the word of God

thus applying myself to them and my intimate acquaintance with those of different denominations led me to marvel excedingly for I discovered that of adorn their profession by a holy walk and Godly conversation agreeable to what I found contained in that sacred depository this was a grief to my Soul

thus from the age of twelve years to fifteen I pondered many things in my heart concerning the situation of the world of mankind the contentions and div[is]ions the wicke[d]ness and abominations and the darkness which pervaded the minds of mankind

my mind become excedingly distressed for I became convicted of my sins, and by searching the scriptures I found that did not come unto the Lord but that they had apostatised from the true and liveing faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament

and I felt to mourn for my own sins and for the sins of the world for I learned in the scriptures that God was the same yesterday to day and forever that he was no respecter to persons for he was God

for I looked upon the sun the glorious luminary of the earth and also the moon rolling in their majesty through the heavens and also the stars shining in their courses and the earth also upon which I stood and the beast of the field and the fowls of heaven and the fish of the waters and also man walking forth upon the face of the earth in magesty and in the strength of beauty whose power and inteligence in governing the things which are so exceding great and marvilous even in the likeness of him who created

and when I considered upon these things my heart exclaimed well hath the wise man said fool saith in his heart there is no God

my heart exclaimed all these bear testimony and bespeak an omnipotant and omnipreasant power a being who makith laws and decreeeth and bindeth all things in their bounds who filleth Eternity who was and is and will be from all Eternity to Eternity

and when I considered all these things and that being seeketh such to worship him as worship him in spirit and in truth therefore I cried unto the Lord for mercy for there was none else to whom I could go and obtain mercy and the Lord heard my cry in the wilderness and while in attitude of calling upon the Lord a piller of light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me and I was filled with the spirit of god

and the opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph thy sins are forgiven thee. go thy walk in my statures and keep my commandments

behold I am the Lord of glory I was crucifyed for the world that all those who believe on my name may have Eternal life

the world lieth in sin at this time and none doeth good no not one they have turned asside from the gospel and keep not commandments
they draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me and mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them according to th[e]ir ungodliness and to bring to pass that which been spoken by the mouth of the prophets and Ap[o]stles behold and lo I come quickly as it [is] written of me in the cloud in the glory of my Father

and my soul was filled with love and for many days I could rejoice with great Joy and the Lord was with me, but [I] could find none that would believe the hevnly vision nevertheless I pondered these things in my heart”

(From Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 4-6.)

Obvious differences are the inclusion of young Joseph’s concern for over his own sins and salvation and his assurance that his sins were forgiven. Also, in the earlier account, his own scripture reading had convinced him that contemporary Christian sects had practices that were not in keeping with the precedents described in the New Testament. Although we hadn’t written “Two Personages,” another difference is that there is no indication of multiple personages in the earlier account. I then passed out a chart based on information compiled by Richard P. Howard from six versions of the First Vision story (published in Restoration Studies, vol. 1, 107-117; revised and made into a chart by Mark A. Scherer). The chart illustrates an evolution in the details concerning the way the story was remembered and told, from the unfamiliar 1832 account up to the familiar 1842 account.

My point in highlighting the evolution was not to discount or deconstruct the experience. I don’t believe that Joseph Smith told the story different ways because he was “just making it up.” Rather, we should understand that the story was told at different times, to different audiences, for different purposes. It’s clear that memory is also elastic. When our class “remembered” that Joseph had been charged to found the church, they weren’t “lying.” Despite the fact that everyone knew this story so well and none of the accounts includes this detail, our own memories supplied the detail because we know this story as the pivotal precursor to the foundation of the church. Our memories “fixed” the story we know so well by adding details that didn’t originally exist. Likewise, as the theological speculation in Nauvoo turned to the nature of God, Joseph’s later retellings of the story began to include the memory of multiple, distinct “personages.”

I then suggested to the class that we today in the church are also a very different audience than anyone in the 1830s and 1840s, and that the significance of this experience has presumably evolved for us as well. For example, our class balked at the detail that the creeds of fellow denominations are called “an abomination” in the traditional 1842 account. Class members had three or four ways they rationalized that term in order to soften or delete it because as a faith community, we no longer believe we have to call everyone else “false,” in order to claim to possess truth ourselves.

I had intended to ask the class for other enduring truths or elements of the First Vision story that still have meaning for our church, our congregation, and ourselves as individuals today. However, as you can imagine, the lesson had already run long, so I just supplied my own answers, which were: personal search for the divine in all things, continuing revelation, God’s love for all people, open faith without set creeds, hope for forgiveness/salvation.

I ended with the open-ended question that started the lesson. If early church members were unfamiliar with the First Vision story — if it did not originally hold the place in the narrative that it does now — “How does our history begin?”

As it turned out, they only wanted to talk about Joseph Smith. Apparently, our faith movement’s founder represented all that anybody needs to know about contemporary Latter Day Saint groups.

To shorten a long and rather nasty story, I’ll just skip to the part where representatives from United Methodist, Presbyterian, Disciples of Christ, and Roman Catholic Churches prevailed. A Methodist pastor put it this way: “Nobody asked me to prove I was ‘Christian enough’ to join, so why should we start now?”

Eventually most of the fundamentalists/evangelicals bolted from the alliance when an LDS representative was admitted a few years later. They formed their own group, which over time has dwindled in size and influence.

I mention this episode as a way to ask, “Do we expect to be misunderstood or misrepresented?” Is this a natural outgrowth of religious discrimination and persecution experienced by our forebears in the almost two centuries of our faith movement’s existence? Although nobody’s getting tarred and feathered these days (at least here in North America, as far as I’m aware), has suspicion become our default setting?

A few weeks ago I received what was, in actuality, a personal and professional compliment. Yet my first response was something along the lines of “What did he really mean by that?”

Bill Tammeus is the former religion/faith writer for the Kansas City Star. He is highly respected locally and nationally and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for the Star years ago. He graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism a few years before I did. And he writes a monthly column for his own denomination’s magazine, the Presbyterian Outlook, a bi-weekly column for the National Catholic Reporter, and his daily blog, “Faith Matters,” is read by a wide audience.

In early July he featured my book, What Was Paul Thinking?, on that blog. As part of his comments about the book, he noted that it might just be the book to finally get the conversation about the New Perspective on Paul out of scholarly circles and into the hands of people in the pews where it really needs to be today. And then he added this paragraph:

One thing I found especially interesting about this book is that the author is a member of the Community of Christ, which used to be known as the Reorganized Church of Latter-day Saints, the smaller branch of the Mormons. But as far as I could tell nothing in Brown’s book is in any way different from the way a scholar who came from one of the traditional Christian branches (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox) might have written it.

Wait a minute—What?

Several other Community of Christ members agreed with my initial assessment that that was at least a curious thing to say. A couple even thought it might be a veiled slam against the church.

I have since been assured by a highly respected friend, who is personally and professionally acquainted with Mr. Tammeus, that the comment was anything but a “slam.” In fact, my friend said it was a sincere and significant compliment to me, the church, and other Community of Christ members who’ve engaged in graduate-level religious studies. Furthermore, it bodes well for the church long-term.

You can read the entire blog entry here, if you want the complete context. But I’d like to return to my original concern with some questions:

1. Do we still have remnants of a “persecution complex” in the Community of Christ?

2. Will we ever be fully accepted as part of mainstream Christianity—and is that something we should even want anyway? By the way, just how significant was it to have the general secretary of the (U.S.) National Council of Churches address this year’s World Conference?

3. At what point do “different” and “distinct” cross over into “exclusionary”? Is there a slippery slope involved in all this somewhere?

4. What’s been the experience of other CofC members in seminaries, graduate schools, and other higher-education institutions? (My seminary experience was 30 years ago, so I’m certain something has changed.)

5. Will people outside the church (particularly in the media) ever just refer to our church name as Community of Christ without mentioning what it used to be?

Perhaps we in the Community of Christ fuss over the whole question of identity way too much. We’ve certainly spent a lot of time pondering who we are, who we aren’t, what makes us different or distinctive (two quite different things, I contend), what we believe, what we’ve discarded along the way, and what we’ve acquired on our faith journey. I can’t help but wonder if we’d put half that much energy into evangelism and mission (once again, two different things) how our life together might be different today.

What really got me to thinking about this was reading an edited volume Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries. I highly recommend this volume. Some of the essays are brilliant, while others, well, leave much to be desired. Nonetheless, several essayists offered reappraisals of Joseph Smith that I thought could be useful for Community of Christ members. And Joseph needs some serious reclamation by members of our tradition. We need to move beyond the stage of adolescent critique that we’ve been stuck in for the last few decades (that stage where we find out that our spiritual parents were not perfect and we act a lot like judgmental teenagers after this revelation) to a more mature appreciation for our ancestors. And Joseph has shaped us in too many ways for us to ignore him.

So, how has Joseph shaped us positively? First, we can acknowledge Joseph as an agent who gave us sacraments whereby we have experienced God’s grace and healing for generations. In the Community of Christ, we have eight sacraments—communion, baptism, confirmation, the blessing of children, marriage, ordination, administration (or the laying on of hands for the sick), marriage, and our one unique sacrament, the evangelist’s blessing. To say that Joseph gave us the sacraments is kind of like saying that Franklin Roosevelt gave us social security. FDR certainly signed it into law and supported it, but it took countless people to pass the program and implement it. And there were other programs in other places of the world that were like social security. FDR did not invent the idea out of thin air. We can think of the sacraments in our church with a similar analogy. They developed long before Joseph’s time, were incorporated into our denomination sometimes directly by him, or sometimes out of previous habit by members. This is the case, for instance, with confirmation, a practice that members did before there was any official rationale for it. But it was Joseph Smith who signed the sacraments into law, if you will, by giving us sections in the Doctrine and Covenants talking about them—words that have helped guide generations of people as to how we express God’s grace through ritual means.

Second, Joseph provided a corrective to some more extreme Protestant assertions that all that mattered was the spirit, not the body or the world. Joseph really got something right when he talked about the gospel of the kingdom being about this world. We call that concept Zion, and at its best, it gives us present resources to talk about this world as sacred. We can’t call Joseph Smith an environmentalist, since that term is anachronistic when applied to someone in the early nineteenth century. But we can appreciate him as one who sees place, space, and bodies as sacred. Listen to Joseph’s rendition of Enoch’s vision in Genesis. At one point, Genesis 7:55-56 in the Inspired Version, the text reads as follows: “And it came to pass, that Enoch looked upon the earth, and he heard a voice from the bowels thereof, saying, Woe! woe! is me, the mother of men! I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children! When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which has gone forth out of me? When will my Creator sanctify me, that I may rest, and righteousness for a season abide upon my face? And when Enoch heard the earth mourn, he wept, and cried unto the Lord, saying, O Lord, wilt thou not have compassion upon the earth? wilt thou not bless the children of Noah?”

The earth in these verses is groaning—in need of redemption. Thoughtfully (perhaps creatively) interpreted, we have some resources in our own older tradition to talk about creation care, right here. I can’t fully address this last point here—it is for another post and another person who has a background in environmental theology. Nonetheless, I just wanted to lift up the possibility that we have sacred texts from Joseph Smith that can help us express our love and care for God’s creation. There are other points that I could list here (such as Joseph’s role in creating our Community of Christ concept of temple space), but all posts must have an end.

So, how do you celebrate Joseph Smith as a spiritual parent? For you personally, why is he worth remembering?

If for no other reason, his presenation did get me thinking.  Meldrum’s claim, a part of which I’d never heard before, was that:

(1) The Book of Mormon is an historic document, detailing people, locations, and events which really took place

(2) The Hopewell moundbuilders are the closest descendants to the Lamanites

(3) DNA proves (through his understanding of Haplogroup X) that Native Americans have genetics from the Israel region

(4) Joseph Smith believed the Book of Mormon to have occurred in the United States

(5) The events and locations in the Book of Mormon are mostly throughout Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri.  Particularly, he emphasized his belief that the city of Zarahemla was directly across the river from Nauvoo’s present location.

Meldrum’s website he pointed everyone to was www.bookofmormonevidence.com.

Many in attendance were clearly ecstatic over his conclusions, others seemed frustrated by it, but it began a discussion if nothing else.  It got me pondering the place of the Book of Mormon in the Community of Christ.  What is its role?  I know many CofC who maintain the Book of Mormon is indeed an historic document and believe they know the exact place.  Every spring some go down into Mexico hunting for the records in what they believe to be the real Hill Cumorah.  A congregation in central Missouri traveled through Nauvoo last week and in talking to them, many were vocal in their belief that the Book of Mormon couldn’t be a historical document because of DNA studies and horses and things like that.  The belief among at least one was that it was an identity formation tool divised by Joseph to  distinguish the early church, but a creation from his own mind.  There are all sorts of beliefs and views on the book, is it historical or not?  Is it inspired scripture or not?  Was it written by Joseph or someone else, Sidney Rigdon perhaps?  I’m sure we’ve all heard the old arguments and cases back and forth, maybe even during church.

From my view, it seems all this discussion and debate has simply accomplished the reaction in the Community of Christ to just stop talking about the Book of Mormon all together.  No one quite knows what to do with it, so many use it, many do not – and many just pretend it does not even exist.  In talking with some others on this subject, one made the valid point that regardless of what you personally believe on the book they believed it dishonest to go into foreign nations without even bringing it up to new members.  When they arrive in the US for Conference or some other purpose, then boom, there it is with little to no warning.  Are we capable of  having civil discussions about the Book of Mormon regardless of whether we believe it is scriptural or not?

There’s a new book out, titled something along the lines of An Inconvenient Truth: the Community of Christ and the Book of Mormon.  I’ve skimmed it very briefly so far, but have not had a chance to read it through yet.  The conclusion he makes, as I gathered from my quick perusal, was that unless something significant happens soon the Book of Mormon will likely disappear from the CofC within the next 20 years.  If he’s right, will anyone notice?

The good Lord who had sent the Lakwena decided to change his work from that of a doctor to that of a military commander for one simple reason: it is useless to cure a man today only that he be killed the next. So it became an obligation on his part to stop the bloodshed before continuing his work as a doctor.

Alice Auma, assuming the name Alice Lakwena, led a insurgency against the new government, known as the Holy Spirit Movement, which had several early victories before being defeated by the new Ugandan Army. (For more information on Alice Auma/Lakwena and the Holy Spirit Movement, see this book or this article).

Alice Lakwena, as a religio-military commander, stands in a long tradition of Warrior Prophets that extend as far back as Joan of Arc, Guru Gobind Singh, Mohammed and King David. Warrior Prophets have been particularly prominant in modern Sub-Saharan Africa, associated with guerilla movements in, for example, Zimbabwe and Sudan. In areas of the world where political authority is fragmented and the state does not have a monopoly on the use of violence, savvy and consummate ‘political entrepreneurs’ take advantage of their ability to wield violence to rise to power (and often prosperity) by offering security to people willing to accept their authority and punishing those who are unwilling to do so (For further information, see this book on warlordism in Africa, or this one on Afghanistan). Likewise, Paul Gifford, a scholar of African Christianity, has argued that charismatic and dogmatic religion provides believers with a sense of stability as Africa faces great social, political and economic upheavals in its encounter with modernity.  Warrior Prophets are thus able to capitalize on the dual opportunities created by chaos — people’s perceived needs for 1) a powerful, paternalistic protector and 2) a charismatic diviner who is able to provide assurance of cosmic certainty. They offer the promise of both physical and spiritual security.

It may be enlightening to understand Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of both the Mormon and Community of Christ churches, as having played a similar role in mid-19th century America. His time was one of great political, social and economic upheaval.

As a charismatic, ‘magical’ leader, Smith provided divine explanations for the social disruption of the industrial revolution and chaos of the frontier. As people lived short, nasty and brutish lives in the swamps of Nauvoo, Illinois, he claimed that people could become gods and that a mighty kingdom would be establish on the banks of the Mississippi. Like Alice Auma, he promised the coming of heaven on earth. To his followers, the trials of mid-19th century life were thus not simply the result of hard times — they were divinely ordained signs of great things to come.

In addition to promising answers to existential questions, Joseph Smith also arrogated himself to the position of a military leader in the Missouri Mormon War and later formed a 5,000-person strong militia in Nauvoo. Tellingly, Smith provided numerous depictions of Warrior Prophets in the Book of Mormon, notably characters like Nephi, Mormon and Moroni. Smith claimed to offer his supporters security in the chaos of the American frontier, where there were only nascent state institutions and a pervasive vigilantism.

However, the security offered by Warrior Prophets is often ephemeral. Warrior Prophets can actually become a source of insecurity, even for their own followers. Firstly, this is because messianism is likely to lead to hubris and provocation of much more powerful institutions. For example, if Mullah Omar had kept his Taliban a relatively humble and local movement, and turned away links with transnational Islamist movements, he would not have provoked the wrath of the US security apparatus. Secondly, the ardent devotion inspired in their followers is often interpreted as a deeply disturbing threat by other nonbelievers. Thirdly, tempted by megalomania, Warrior Prophets may concentrate authority in themselves, becoming ever more detached from reality. For example, following the defeat of the Holy Spirit Movement, a splinter group called the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony (who claims to have inherited the spirit of Lakwena from Alice Auma), has become a watchword for bizarre and brutal violence in the region spanning northern Uganda, southern Sudan and eastern DR Congo. Kony is a source of insecurity even to his own troops, the majority of whom are forcibly abducted.

While Joseph Smith Jr. never reached the levels of madness and psychosis of Kony, he too actually made his followers more insecure, through provocation of surrounding communities. Indeed, the early Mormons were displaced far more than ordinary settlers on the frontier. Counter-intuitively, this heightened insecurity may have actually increased some church members’ dependency on Joseph Smith and his equally war-like successor Brigham Young.

Interestingly, many of the early members of the Community of Christ were those who had been nervous with the militarist direction taken by Joseph Smith, Jr. Indeed, the transition to his son, Joseph Smith III, the first president of the Community of Christ was a classic case of Weber’s transition from charismatic to bureaucratic authority. Joseph Smith III embodied a pragmatic, unobtrusive and significantly less provocative style of leadership than his father. He thus offered a very different approach to security for his followers — that of assimilation and non-provocation of the surrounding population.

-Matthew Bolton

On April 6, 1830, when six men including Joseph Smith Jr. came together in upstate New York to organize a church, they founded a new religious movement. When they chose the name “Church of Christ,” they created a brand identity problem that has been with that movement ever since.

The name “Church of Christ” was chosen because the members wanted to restore Christianity to its original (or primitive) form, as described in the New Testament of the Bible. Since the Bible gave no name to the church other than “churches of Christ” (Romans 16:16) or “church of God” (1 Corinthians 1:2), they reasoned that a restored church could have no other name. The original name of the restored church was highlighted in the first issue of its first official publication, The Evening and the Morning Star (Independence, Missouri: June 1832).

The only problem for our “Church of Christ” was that a number of other Christians had already had the same idea. For example, in the previous two decades Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone had each founded churches that attempted to restore primitive Christianity by paying close attention to New Testament practices. They likewise called their churches the “Christian church” or the “Church of Christ.”*

Meanwhile, outsiders quickly seized upon the church’s new book of scripture to create a much more distinct and memorable name: “Mormonite” or “Mormon.” As Oliver Cowdery explained in the May 3, 1834, issue of The Evening and the Morning Star:

As the members of this church profess a belief in the truth of the book of Mormon, the world, either out of contempt or ridicule, or to distinguish us from others, have been very lavish in bestowing the title of “Mormonite.” Others may call themselves by their own, or by other names, and have the privilege of wearing them without our changing them or attempting to do so; but we do not accept the above title, nor shall we wear it as our name, though it may be lavished upon us double to what it has heretofore been. (Emphasis in original.)

To fix the problem, Cowdery explained that the church was adopting a new name: “Church of the Latter Day Saints.” It should be noted that in the editorial announcing the change, the “D” in “Day” was capitalized and no hyphen was placed between the words “Latter” and “Day.” The church’s next official periodical, the Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate made use of the same name.

Although it has proved impossible to displace “Mormon,” the “Latter Day Saint” brand has become reasonably well known to outsiders and can be considered a success. That was small consolation to many early members of the restoration who still believed that the church had to be called “Church of Christ” and chafed at the new, non-scriptural name. Their complaints led to a compromise and a new name for the church. Unfortunately, like many compromises, the hybrid solution was worse than its component parts, and the unwieldy moniker “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” was debuted in 1838. It appears here in the church’s Nauvoo newspaper, the Times and Seasons.

After the succession crisis of 1844, “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” continued to be the name of several Mormon offshoots, including James J. Stang’s church (reorganized 1844) and William Smith’s church (reorganized 1847). Brigham Young’s church in Utah (reorganized 1847) continues to be known under this name, having standardized the spelling as “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Other groups returned to a variant of the original name, including Sidney Rigdon’s Church of Christ (reorganized 1844), Alpheus Cutler’s Church of Jesus Christ (reorganized 1853), William Bickerton’s Church of Jesus Christ (reorganized 1862), and Granville Hedrick’s Church of Christ (reorganized 1863).

The group now known as the Community of Christ continued to employ the 1838 name “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,” as it emerged in the 1850s, and this is the official name in early issues of its periodical, The True Latter Day Saints Herald.

However, to differentiate itself from other groups, especially the much larger church in Utah, the phrases “New Organization” and “Reorganization” began to be applied to the church. When the church incorporated in 1872, the corporate name became “Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” This name and its abbreviation “RLDS” were convenient and widely used, but well into the 20th century, many RLDS congregations continued to identify themselves using the 1838 name (i.e., without the word “Reorganized.”) The long-standing RLDS name still appears in relief on the seals of numerous church buildings, like the Joseph Smith Historic Site in Nauvoo (shown below).

If “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” is a terribly cumbersome name, “Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” is surely worse. The problem was very apparent by the 1950s and 60s, and in 1968, the church’s World Conference voted to create a committee to consider alternatives. The committee recommended that the official name remain, but suggested that the church emphasize the word “Saints” and created “Saints’ Church” as an official nickname. Logos between 1972-1976 emphasized the Saints brand, but the change wasn’t popular with everyone and the 1976 World Conference ended the practice.

As the turn of the millennium approached, a new committee was formed to take up the naming question. Beyond being cumbersome, a problem with the “RLDS” name was its essentially negative identity, stating what the church was not (i.e., LDS), but failing to articulate what the church actually was. The new name approved by the World Conference in the year 2000 finally resolved these issues. “Community of Christ” honors the church’s early heritage, paying homage to the original Church of Christ name. But it also creates a positive identity by emphasizing the church’s core values: building community based on the principles taught by Jesus.

Nearly eighteen decades have passed since the early church was organized and the Latter Day Saint movement began. The branding problem lingers — the church is still “formerly the RLDS Church, the second largest denomination in Mormonism” — but members can now unfurl a new banner that captures the spirit of their faith journey, as the church progresses ever forward.

_____________________
* The descendants of the Stone-Campbell movement include today’s Churches of Christ, Independent Christian Churches/Churches of Christ, and the Christian Church/Disciples of Christ.