Living as a people of Pentecost from Kirtland to the Philippines

Photo by Chad Godfrey

Seth Bryant, Team Leader of the Community of Christ Historic Sites Foundation, reflects on what it means for Community of Christ to live as a people of Pentecost, drawing on both church history and a recent global gathering in the Philippines. This reflection was shared on Beyond the Walls on March 8.

Recently, members of our church from around the world gathered in the Philippines to develop worship resources including art, prayer, and music. Both Leandro and I were among the 70 plus people who took part in this historical and unprecedented gathering. It is important to Community of Christ that all voices and peoples are represented, not just the views and culture coming from our headquarters in the United States. This summit in the Philippines was an intentional way of living as a people of Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2.

Our entire church history might be thought of as an attempt to be a people of Pentecost. We are part of the larger primitive Christian movement which looked to Acts 2 as the guidebook for how to restore the church. In the 1830s in Kirtland, Ohio, the Saints sought and experienced an amazing pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit at the dedication of the Kirtland Temple. Later, from the 1860s forward, Saints of the Reorganization also lived as a people of Pentecost, perhaps in a more literal way, as they intentionally supported multi-lingual community and worship.

For Joseph Smith III, this was an extension of his experience growing up in Nauvoo, Illinois, where he studied German, French, and Latin as a boy;[1] and where he later lived among immigrants as an adult. Smith served as Justice of the Peace in Nauvoo, and faced bitter opposition due to joining the Reorganized Church as its president. Nauvoo citizens remembered and did not want to repeat the disaster that had hit Nauvoo less than two decades earlier when Smith’s father had served as church president and a town official. When Joseph Smith III came up for reelection in 1862, he wrote:

I had many friends among the Germans, French, and Austrians of the community. When they found that leading church people with their respective followers and adherents banded together to defeat me for the office, [these immigrants] rallied to my support, and I was elected by a majority of nearly four to one. My popularity with the foreign element was attained by my policy towards them during my former term of office. I drew their deeds, their mortgages, their contracts, and when they were brought before me in civil suits I managed in many instances to secure settlement out of court whereby they were saved much trouble and expense. For all these services I had freely lowered the costs and fees when any were too poor to pay or could ill afford to, and in many cases made no charge at all for what I did for them. It did not suit me to see industrious citizens oppressed because of their lack of familiarity with our language or customs.  As church president, Smith honored that all should hear and be heard in their own tongue. The Reorganized Church had a multicultural branch in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, with members who were Welsh, French, American, German, and English. Near and in church headquarters in Plano, Illinois, members spoke English, Norwegian, and German; and in the Plano church library, you can find books in German.  

I’ll close with another example from the life of Joseph Smith III on how being a people of Pentecost meant that all should speak the gospel in their own language, and be heard and honored. In 1868, Smith took part in a prayer meeting where four Native Americans were in attendance. Smith calls these men “Lamanites” although that designation is problematic from our view today; but here’s what I will endorse wholeheartedly: at that meeting, one of them, an older man named Moses James, asked if he could “speak in his native tongue.” The presiding elder referred the question to the church president in attendance. Smith writes in his memoirs, “I replied, ‘Certainly; let him speak in his native tongue if he wishes. While we may not be able to understand his words, we shall be able to tell whether or not he has the good Spirit with him when talking.’”

His memoirs continue: “Accordingly, both he and Brother Covert spoke in their native language, but to my surprise and great pleasure, I heard their words in English! As they finished, I arose and told the people what they had said, which surprised the Lamanites exceedingly. They sang a song in their Indian tongue, which I also heard in English as they delivered it. Altogether the experience was extremely interesting to us and to the Lamanite brethren, and the meeting was one long to be renumbered.”  I am honored to be a member of a church that, historically and today, honors the worth of all persons, and unity in diversity.

Watch Seth on YouTube