Week 54: Are You the Church of Jesus Christ?
Dear Loved Ones,
This Tuesday, in the middle of our visitors' center shift, my usually uptight boss let all the sisters run across the street to tour the community of Christ temple. I toured it when I came to Independence in 2016 and my impressions of it haven't changed much. Very beautiful. Very globally-focused. There's a plaza with tiles shaped like a map of the world and artwork throughout the building pulls from different cultures. Their hymn books have African-American spirituals and foreign language hymns. Piling so many songs together makes them fat as Bibles.
Now, it's not a temple. It's an architectural marvel with art along the corridors and an organ in the middle. It's not for ordinances. But they've still made it a sanctuary for worship. They hold a daily prayer for peace in their sanctuary (pictures of the sanctuary will be attached in a separate email) where they pray for a country of the day by name. The country that day was Jordan.
Women hold the priesthood in their church and artwork around the building showed women giving blessings in places across the globe. But only men speak or pray in church. We watched a man take the stand in front of their magnificent organ, light two candles, give a short sermon, and offer a very Christ-center prayer.
As we left, my friend and roommate Emma felt some holy envy. "We can do better," she said. "I bring people to church and the talks are just about whatever." Not about Christ.
If you want more people to join the church, you really oughta make church something worth joining. One of the problems with calling random members of the ward to take the pulpit on Sundays is that every talk is a wild card. I've sat through a lot of sermons where people just babble on about the bottle rockets they make as a hobby or the time their kid dropped a green popsicle, got ants over it, picked it up, and got ants all over their face. Do talks like that bring people closer to Christ? Speak your sermons as if they were the first anyone had ever heard. You don't know who slipped into the back row that week. You might be creating a standing reputation for the church.
Lots of guests who come into the visitors' center like to bash our neighbors across the street. They call their temple Babylon, Rameumptom, or the great and spacious building. That's uncalled for. One man toured their temple, left unsettled, come over to us, and said he didn't want to go on a tour, just exist in our space for a while so he could "Have a Jesus moment."
Would you feel that same sense of discomfort if you visited a Catholic cathedral? They are very close cousins to our faith, and sometimes they beat us out. Long before we nixed the word Mormon, the church called RLDS changed their name to the Community of CHRIST, putting him front and center.
We had a white elephant party last month where I came away with a book of family home evening-type skits published by the RLDS church in the seventies. They're cheesy and simple and mostly centered on the Bible instead of the Book of Mormon. One of them is about church history. It takes place at a Relief Society meeting in Kirtland in 1835. Emma Smith and her Relief Society friends meet Mr. Lookanlearn, who claims to be a member of "the church of Jesus Christ." But when they ask him which of their husbands baptized him, he has never heard of any of them.
Cool story, but the Relief Society didn't exist in Kirtland. Or Missouri. It was started in Nauvoo, long after 1835. And by the time we got to Nauvoo, it wasn't the Church of Jesus Christ. It was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
It would be easy to scoff at this little book of plays and say that the restoration branches have little regard for their restoration roots. (I'll attach pictures in a separate email of how they represent our shared history in their temple museum.)
But members of our own church veer from historical accuracy for the sake of a good story, too.
I've heard the story, so many times, about how the good sisters of Kirtland dashed their heirloom China to pieces so they could mix glittery bits in with the temple plaster. What a lofty example of sacrifice!
Except they never did that. These women were poor. They didn't have any china to shatter. A man named Artimeus Miller went around collecting already-broken glass and crockery to mix into the plaster, but no housewives were shattering their nonexistent china.
No church-grown story is so good that it can't be made better with an extra dash of suffering. It's not enough for plaster to glitter, it has to glitter by making people SUFFER. Can't some things just be shiny for shiny's sake?
We have a shared history, and at times we both fall short of representing our history and our Savior well. We in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have a long work cut out for us. We can do better and be better.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
This Tuesday, in the middle of our visitors' center shift, my usually uptight boss let all the sisters run across the street to tour the community of Christ temple. I toured it when I came to Independence in 2016 and my impressions of it haven't changed much. Very beautiful. Very globally-focused. There's a plaza with tiles shaped like a map of the world and artwork throughout the building pulls from different cultures. Their hymn books have African-American spirituals and foreign language hymns. Piling so many songs together makes them fat as Bibles.
Now, it's not a temple. It's an architectural marvel with art along the corridors and an organ in the middle. It's not for ordinances. But they've still made it a sanctuary for worship. They hold a daily prayer for peace in their sanctuary (pictures of the sanctuary will be attached in a separate email) where they pray for a country of the day by name. The country that day was Jordan.
Women hold the priesthood in their church and artwork around the building showed women giving blessings in places across the globe. But only men speak or pray in church. We watched a man take the stand in front of their magnificent organ, light two candles, give a short sermon, and offer a very Christ-center prayer.
As we left, my friend and roommate Emma felt some holy envy. "We can do better," she said. "I bring people to church and the talks are just about whatever." Not about Christ.
If you want more people to join the church, you really oughta make church something worth joining. One of the problems with calling random members of the ward to take the pulpit on Sundays is that every talk is a wild card. I've sat through a lot of sermons where people just babble on about the bottle rockets they make as a hobby or the time their kid dropped a green popsicle, got ants over it, picked it up, and got ants all over their face. Do talks like that bring people closer to Christ? Speak your sermons as if they were the first anyone had ever heard. You don't know who slipped into the back row that week. You might be creating a standing reputation for the church.
Lots of guests who come into the visitors' center like to bash our neighbors across the street. They call their temple Babylon, Rameumptom, or the great and spacious building. That's uncalled for. One man toured their temple, left unsettled, come over to us, and said he didn't want to go on a tour, just exist in our space for a while so he could "Have a Jesus moment."
Would you feel that same sense of discomfort if you visited a Catholic cathedral? They are very close cousins to our faith, and sometimes they beat us out. Long before we nixed the word Mormon, the church called RLDS changed their name to the Community of CHRIST, putting him front and center.
We had a white elephant party last month where I came away with a book of family home evening-type skits published by the RLDS church in the seventies. They're cheesy and simple and mostly centered on the Bible instead of the Book of Mormon. One of them is about church history. It takes place at a Relief Society meeting in Kirtland in 1835. Emma Smith and her Relief Society friends meet Mr. Lookanlearn, who claims to be a member of "the church of Jesus Christ." But when they ask him which of their husbands baptized him, he has never heard of any of them. Cool story, but the Relief Society didn't exist in Kirtland. Or Missouri. It was started in Nauvoo, long after 1835. And by the time we got to Nauvoo, it wasn't the Church of Jesus Christ. It was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
It would be easy to scoff at this little book of plays and say that the restoration branches have little regard for their restoration roots. (I'll attach pictures in a separate email of how they represent our shared history in their temple museum.)
But members of our own church veer from historical accuracy for the sake of a good story, too.
I've heard the story, so many times, about how the good sisters of Kirtland dashed their heirloom China to pieces so they could mix glittery bits in with the temple plaster. What a lofty example of sacrifice!
Except they never did that. These women were poor. They didn't have any china to shatter. A man named Artimeus Miller went around collecting already-broken glass and crockery to mix into the plaster, but no housewives were shattering their nonexistent china.
No church-grown story is so good that it can't be made better with an extra dash of suffering. It's not enough for plaster to glitter, it has to glitter by making people SUFFER. Can't some things just be shiny for shiny's sake?
We have a shared history, and at times we both fall short of representing our history and our Savior well. We in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have a long work cut out for us. We can do better and be better.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
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