Joseph Smith the Seeker and Same-sex Marriage: The Community of Christ Negotiating Change

May 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

 

The Community of Christ’s April 2013 USA National Conference in Independence, Missouri resoundingly approved the extension of the sacrament of marriage to same-sex couples and the ordination of individuals in monogamous same-sex relationships. That the Community of Christ, Mormonism’s most progressive denomination, has approved these measures through a democratic conference is perhaps unsurprising. Community of Christ laity and leaders are fond of saying that they are called to be a “prophetic people” rather than “a people with a prophet.” However, as a delegate to the USA conference, I observed that one prophet was very much present among the people. And that prophet was Joseph Smith, Jr.    [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community of Christ, Joseph Smith, Modern Mormonism Leave a Comment

Conferences at the Crossroads of Mormonism

March 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment

When April comes to Independence, Missouri, Latter Day Saints will go to conference. Community of Christ members will go to conference. Latter-day Saints will go to conference. Remnant saints will go to conference. Church of Christ (Temple Lot) members will go to conference. Saints who are first-generation Americans from Samoa will go to conference. Saints who have flown from Nigeria to Missouri will go to conference. And saints from dozens of other nations will go to conference. Members of the counter-cult movement will go to conference, too. Even the radical Fred Phelps of the tiny Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church may go to conference (though no one is inviting him). In April, the millennial ground zero for Joseph Smith’s projected New Jerusalem, better than any place on earth, will become a platform for showcasing the aspirations, issues, and disagreements that shape contemporary Mormon churches. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christianity, Community of Christ, conferences, Modern Mormonism, Mormonism Leave a Comment

French Polynesia and Mormonization: Rethinking Mormon Origins

January 14, 2013 By 4 Comments

On January 3, the Community of Christ’s First Presidency called Maureva M. Arnaud Tchong to serve in the Council of Twelve Apostles. The current mission center president over 60 congregations in French Polynesia, Arnaud will be the first individual of native Polynesian heritage to serve as an apostle in any church descended from Joseph Smith’s nineteenth-century Restoration movement. She will also be the first woman from outside of the United States to serve in the Community of Christ’s Council of Twelve Apostles. [1] Even though Arnaud represents a breakthrough for women in Mormon churches, she stands in a long line of matriarchs who have sustained the Community of Christ in generation after generation. In fact, Arnaud can trace her spiritual heritage through a line of matriarchs that stand at the very origins of the church—all the way back to Tupuai.

In April 1844 on the island of Tupuai, a woman named Tehinaarrii encountered three strangers. Addison Pratt and two other missionaries from Nauvoo, Illinois, were hungry and a long ways from home. They needed help. Tehinaarri took them into her home and “gave them food, housing, and much needed assistance.” [2] Her act of hospitality marked the beginning of the church on the island.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Community of Christ, French Polynesia, Gender, Mormon origins, Mormonism, Priesthood Tagged With: , , , 4 Comments

Latter Day Conversions: Divided Families and Reconciled Relationships

November 11, 2012 By 4 Comments

As a twenty-year old leader in my college youth group, I was asked one day to call a friend who had been active in our youth group but lately had been meeting with the Mormon youth group on campus. Her parents were quite concerned, as she also had begun meeting with two LDS missionaries who were set on baptizing her. And, she was romantically interested in an LDS boy. “Not good…not good at all,” I mumbled to myself.

Now, you should know that my youth group was affiliated with a church that was definitely NOT Mormon. We were former members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), and we called ourselves “Restorationists.” We met in independent congregations away from the more liberal RLDS church who we saw as engaged in doctrinal apostasy. While we were religious and social conservatives, we strongly disagreed on doctrine with the similarly socially conservative LDS church—a group that we simply referred to as the “Utah Mormons.” We didn’t believe in multiple gods, the Book of Abraham, section 132 (the revelation on polygamy), or any kind of celestial marriage or ordinance for the dead. And, like all traditional RLDS, we all knew proof texts from the Bible and the Book of Mormon that we could whip out and wield against any Mormon missionary who called at our door. My friend who was talking to the Mormons knew better than to take them seriously, so I thought.

I dutifully called my friend, and we chatted for a few minutes. Then, she informed me that she did not want to talk on the phone again unless “the [LDS] elders” were present in the room with her. They had told her to do so, she told me. “Unless the elders were present?” I thought to myself. “What kind of manipulators are these guys, anyways?” The conversation ended. In the weeks that followed, my friend pulled away completely from my youth group and from her old church. She even cut off contact with her parents for months. Her family was heartbroken. And I was incensed at some nineteen-year-old Mormon missionaries whom I never met. “Didn’t they care about how they tore apart a family?” I remember wondering to myself. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christianity, Community of Christ, conversion, family, Modern Mormonism, Mormonism, Protestantism 4 Comments

Emma Smith and Ecumenical Miscommunication

July 11, 2012 By 2 Comments

July 10 was the 208th birthday of  Emma Hale Smith Bidamon, wife of Joseph Smith, Jr. In Kirtland, Ohio where I have worked for the past nine summers, the staff at the Community of Christ’s Kirtland Temple organize a July 10th hymn festival in the temple that celebrates Emma’s life. Since the first hymn festival in 2004, three Mormon traditions with a presence in Kirtland participate each year—the relatively conservative Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS); the moderately liberal Community of Christ (formerly called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or RLDS); and members of the independent Restoration Branches movement (a conservative group that broke away from the RLDS church in the 1980s over women’s ordination). What happens, then, when an LDS sister missionary, a Community of Christ historian, and a Restorationist elder all walk into a temple? Miscommunication. And this is actually a good thing. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community of Christ, diversity, Emma Smith, Mormonism 2 Comments

A Mormon Massacre Site and Places within a Space

May 14, 2012 By 4 Comments

The LDS church has purchased the site of the most infamous event of the 1838 Mormon War in Missouri—the site of the Haun’s Mill Massacre. The previous owner of the site, the Community of Christ (formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), announced the sale of the historic ground in an April 3, 2012 e-mail. Originally approached by the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation about the purchase over a year ago, the Community of Christ eventually sold Haun’s Mill and three other historic properties to subsidiaries owned by the LDS church for $41.5 million. [1] The news of the Haun’s Mill sale has generated a fair amount of interest from the members of the many churches descended from Joseph Smith, Jr.’s restoration movement. [2] While the physical site of Haun’s Mill now resembles a rather unremarkable farmer’s field with several small memorial markers dotting its landscape, as a massacre site, it constitutes a piece of  America’s “shadowed ground,” or a place of violence and tragedy that has been “sanctified” by a community. [3] A piece of shadowed ground, like a massacre site, invites any number of narratives about it as people try to make sense of the events once enacted there. Due to the “surplus of meaning” that people assign to it, a massacre site may occupy the same physical space but be a very different place for varying groups and individuals. The Mormon churches in particular have “created” very different Haun’s Mills as they have used the site to illustrate strikingly different church teachings.

Take two recent examples. In 2008, LDS Apostle and First Counselor in the First Presidency Henry B. Eyring recounted [Read more...]

Filed Under: Community of Christ, diversity, massacre site, Mormonism, sacred sites 4 Comments