History of the Latter Day Saint movement

In addition, several early leaders made marked doctrinal and leadership contributions to the movement, including Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, and Brigham Young.

Smith said this angel appeared to him many times, and showed him where to find a set of buried Golden Plates containing ancient writings that the prophet-warrior had sealed in a stone box before his death, together with other artifacts.

The writings on the Golden Plates, according to Smith, contained an account of the various nations that inhabited ancient America, and described how they were led to the New World by Jesus, but eventually lost their Christian faith through a series of wars and corruption.

The book's title page described it as an attempt to show Native Americans "what great things the Lord has done for their fathers", and to convince "Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God."

Latter Day Saints consider the crowning moment of the book to be Jesus' visit to the ancient Americans, during which time he teaches them in person about the meaning of his death and resurrection.

During the translation of the Golden Plates, Smith and Cowdery determined that they needed to obtain the Priesthood, or the authority to act in God's name, which they believed had been lost from the earth during the Great Apostasy.

Some time between June and December 1829, Joseph Smith, David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery said they received a revelation about "how he should build up his church & the manner thereof".

On April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and a group of approximately 50 believers met to formally organize the Church of Christ into a legal institution.

[5][6] By later accounts, this meeting was a charismatic event, in which members of the congregation had visions, prophesied, spoke in tongues, ecstatically shouted praises to the Lord, and fainted (Joseph Smith History, 1839 draft).

The movement more than doubled in size with the conversion of Sidney Rigdon, a former Campbellite minister, who led several congregations of Restorationists in Ohio's Western Reserve area, causing hundreds of his adherents to follow him into Mormonism.

A brief leadership struggle left the former heads of the Missouri portion of the church excommunicated, such as David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, William Wines Phelps and others.

The perceived militant attitude adopted by the church caused some leaders, including Thomas B. Marsh, president of the Quorum of the Twelve, to break with Smith and Rigdon.

This precipitated another schism which led to the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ, the Bride, the Lamb's Wife by George M. Hinkle, who had been the Mormon commander of the Caldwell County militia.

Smith and other leaders were allowed after several months of harsh treatment to escape Missourian custody, and they rejoined the main body of the movement in April, 1839.

Smith, acting in his capacity as mayor and head of the municipal court, responded by having the newspaper declared a "public nuisance" and by ordering the destruction of the press.

Whenever Latter Day Saints gathered in large numbers, they met with opposition from neighbors who suspected that Mormon bloc-voting would lead to theocracy.

By the mid-1840s, many non-Mormons in Hancock County felt threatened by growing Mormon political power, commercial rivalries, and a new religion with at least two elements that were hard to digest in the religious community of that time: first, Latter Day Saints had a somewhat different perspective on the nature of God from traditional Protestants; second, the claim of modern revelation, together with the claim of new scripture, opened the canon of the Bible.

When Smith submitted to imprisonment in the county seat of Carthage, the Governor of Illinois, Thomas Ford, left the jail, taking the only impartial local militia unit with him.

[citation needed] Other men who (by some reports) were designated as successors, including Book of Mormon witnesses David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery, had been excommunicated from the church.

A vote of the congregation overwhelmingly supported Young's proposal, said to have been caused by Brigham briefly yet miraculously having the "voice and countenance of Joseph Smith" during his talk.

Rigdon, Young and Marks were later joined by a fourth claimant, James J. Strang of Voree, Wisconsin, who claimed that Smith had sent him a letter designating him as his successor.

The largest group of Latter Day Saints followed nine of the Twelve Apostles west, establishing a way station at Winter Quarters, Nebraska in 1846, and entering Salt Lake Valley in 1847.

Having planted this initial colony in the Great Basin, Young returned to Winter Quarters and in December 1847 reorganized his faction of the church, establishing himself as the head of a new First Presidency.

This reorganization led to additional schisms, including the break with Alpheus Cutler and what became the Church of Christ (Cutlerite) as well as Lyman Wight's group in Zodiac, Texas.

This has continued to be the second largest Latter Day Saint group, with headquarters on a portion of the original Temple Lot in Independence, Missouri.

Others remained unaffiliated, however, and in 1863 a group of Latter Day Saints from Illinois and Indiana united under the leadership of Granville Hedrick and reclaimed the name of the movement's original organization, the "Church of Christ."

While the Community of Christ is somewhat more in line doctrinally with mainline Protestantism, they also believe in the Book of Mormon and an open scriptural canon, and place great emphasis upon peacemaking and similar pursuits.

Most Latter Day Saint sects believe that authority from Jesus Christ is necessary in order to baptize, give the gift of the Holy Ghost, or administer the Lord's Supper (or the sacrament).

Many of Joseph Smith's early revelations prophesied that the Latter Day Saints would build Zion, a new Jerusalem, a religious utopia centered in Jackson County, MO.

However, when they failed to live the Law of Consecration, which was a promise to voluntarily give all their property to the community for equal distribution, Joseph Smith received a revelation that God would build Zion later, when the people were ready.