By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?

Psalm 137:1-4 NRSV

It’s been about a week since the sale of historic assets by the Community of Christ (CofC) to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Many non-CofC people may be wondering just when we will get over it already and move on. Well, that’s a tougher task than you might imagine.

The $192.5 million (US) purchase price included quite a variety of items, from buildings in Nauvoo and Kirtland almost 200 years old to manuscripts, journals, portraits, and, oddly enough, even the original door from the Liberty, Missouri, jail where Joseph Smith, Jr., was once incarcerated. But the sadness, heartache, anguish, mourning, and anger that continue to roil the church are pretty much centered on the loss of the Kirtland Temple.

That’s because the Kirtland Temple (or more accurately titled, “The House of the Lord”) is more than simply a treasured historic asset. Ever since the Smith family and the Reorganization (and it’s always been hard to tell where one stopped and the other began) waged a legal battle in the late 19th century to secure title to the property, it’s taken on a somewhat mythic status for church members. In fact, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to consider the Kirtland Temple the “spiritual home” of the Reorganization. And now it’s gone. But, then, so is the Reorganization. Let me explain.

Yes, the church, once it officially took on the new name of Community of Christ on April 6, 2001 (we do love that April 6 date in the Restoration movement, do we not?) still kept the old name, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, for legal purposes. So many documents would have to be changed and, perhaps more importantly, we didn’t want anybody else to start using the name. And there would certainly be groups trying to do just that. But at the very least, it must be admitted that the church has come a long, long way from its two founding moments: April 6, 1830, when the original church was organized; and April 6, 1860, when scattered remnants of the early church came together in Amboy, Illinois, with Joseph Smith III (the founder’s eldest son) as its prophet-president.

A key figure in both those events was Emma Smith. Interestingly, her famous portrait from September 1842 along with that of her husband Joseph, were included in the recent sale. The nature of portraiture, of course, is to make the subject look good rather than exactly how the individual looked in real life. That’s true for these two portraits. I have to admit that at first I was shocked and saddened the portraits would be removed from the Community of Christ history museum in Independence, Missouri. For the most part, Emma and Joseph’s descendants have been part of the Reorganization, often in pivotal leadership roles. That included the office of prophet-president from Joseph Smith III to three of his sons, Fred M. Smith, Israel A. Smith, and W. Wallace Smith, and the latter Smith’s son, Wallace B. Smith. Plus, it is well known that Emma and Brigham Young had a contentious relationship. Actually, they simply despised one another. That’s a story for another time, but it’s worth mentioning that it’s only in the last few decades that the LDS church has looked favorably on Emma.

I can’t help comparing Emma’s 1842 portrait with the 1845 daguerreotype at the top of this post, which shows Emma with the youngest of her eleven children (most didn’t survive long, sadly), David Hyrum Smith, who was born in November 1844, five months after Joseph was killed at the Carthage, Illinois, jail. Notice, I use the word “killed” instead of “martyred”; we prefer the former term in Community of Christ. Once again, that’s a story for another time.

Look closely at that daguerreotype and you’ll see a woman who had been through a lot, enduring one hardship and crisis after another from Pennsylvania and New York to Kirtland, Ohio, to northern Missouri to Nauvoo, Illinois. And there she is, a widowed mother of young children, holding the youngest who’d never known his father. Behind Emma’s tired eyes I see pain and heartache, a history of hard choices.

This is the woman who, after the Missouri governor’s infamous Extermination Order, with Joseph in Liberty jail that winter, fled with her children across northern Missouri, crossing the frozen Mississippi River to an uncertain future in Quincy, Illinois. And, oh yes, under her skirt she carried the unfinished manuscript of Joseph’s biblical revision. What is known today by the CofC as the Inspired Version of the Holy Scriptures and by others as the Joseph Smith Translation (JST). That manuscript was part of last week’s sale, too.

There’s good reasons why the Reorganized Church has sometimes been referred to as Emma’s Church. This week I’ve been thinking about Emma as my faith community recovers from the shock of the Kirtland Temple’s sale and begins to deal with the hard choice CofC leaders faced as they completed negotiations to ensure those historic sites could continue to be maintained properly. We won’t own them anymore, but at least they go to a buyer who I think will treasure that stewardship as we have. Four CofC apostles and the presiding bishop offer their perspectives in short videos here. They’re worth watching, especially the one by Apostle Lachlan Mackay, who is not only the church’s director of historic sites but also is a great-grandson of President Frederick M. Smith and, therefore, a direct descendant of Joseph and Emma Smith.

So, what is this hard choice faced by the CofC leaders and members?

Today the CofC can be found in more than 130 nations, and most likely a majority of its active members are somewhere other than North America. That expanding mission field desperately needs the financial resources of the so-called Developed World. There’s the stark reality that we couldn’t maintain historic sites AND support the mission of the church. So a choice had to be made: maintenance or mission? And what is that mission?

We proclaim Jesus Christ and promote communities of joy, hope, love, and peace.

To go along with that mission statement is the church’s vision statement:

We will become a worldwide church dedicated to the pursuit of peace, reconciliation, and healing of the spirit.”

This appears to be quite different from the idea of restoring the One True Church and its divinely authorized holy priesthood. Allow me to speak here as an individual member of the Community of Christ and not as an official representative. Keep in mind that instead of correlation we have as one of our 9 Enduring Principles, “Unity in Diversity.” That’s a polite way of saying there’s no one right way to be Community of Christ.

I know of no reputable scholar who can identify anything resembling a pure, golden era of the early Christian Church. Instead there were a multitude of communities following the “Way of Jesus Christ.”. Eventually, the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Orthodox Church in the East became predominate; the “losers” typically were branded as heretics. My point is: How can you restore something that never existed?

Several decades ago the RLDS Church began to back away from its One True Church position as well as the question of which church is the rightful successor to the one organized by Joseph Smith. I believe a better approach is to say none of the current churches in our wide religious movement are exactly like that 1830s organization. But we can all be true and faithful to its spirit while diverging in significant ways. Certainly one of those ways has to do with priesthood. The RLDS/CofC has been ordaining women since the mid-1980s, and more recently has specifically extended priesthood ordination and observance of sacraments (especially marriage) in many nations to the LGBTQ+ community.

All this is to say the leadership of CofC has, once again, been faced with a hard choice, perhaps its most difficult. We have been fond of saying, “Christ’s mission is our mission.” Now we have to live that, even if it means our long-cherished “spiritual home” is sold to somebody else who can physically take care of the building so we can more completely become the prophetic people we claim we are in our mission and vision statements. We can still visit Kirtland; it just won’t be “home.”

We have another temple, one dedicated in 1993 to the pursuit of peace. Its magnificent spiral shape signifies both the inward and outward movement of the Holy Spirit through contemplation and action. Our hymnal is filled with songs of justice, reconciliation, and peace as well as old favorites. Yes, we’ll continue to sing “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning” with gusto and passion (even if some of its theology makes us a bit uneasy).

Perhaps we’ll always be “Emma’s Church,” in one sense or another: a life filled with hard choices, joy, disappointments, and mountaintop highs. Most of all, a life that keeps moving forward, no matter what.

  • What is your “spiritual home”? Why is it important to you?
  • The Community of Christ and the LDS church continue to take divergent paths. Do you think the sale of these historic assets will further distance the two faith communities or perhaps bring them closer together in some way?
  • Are “Correlation” in the LDS church and “Unity in Diversity” in the CofC true opposites, as the author implies?
  • How might the choice between maintenance and mission be expressed within the LDS church? What other choices might the CofC and LDS churches face in the future?