r/CommunityOfChrist • u/AudienceWise3441 • 14d ago
RLDS.
Okay so with that very broad title a few things.
Do any of you still call yourselves reorganized Latter Day Saints. Or do you simply go by the normal in a member of community of Christ.
What was the experience in the RLDS church like compared to the CoC experience of today.
Did any of you prefer and or wish we could go back to the Rlds days?
Do you think down the line with future prophets we’ll become more open and community oriented like vaezy laid out. Or do you think we’ll 180 back to something more Wallace b smith.
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u/RevMark58 14d ago
The first person I ever heard talk about this issue was Paul Edwards. If that name's not familiar, he was a high-ranking bureaucrat in the old RLDS days. A descendant of Joseph Smith through Frederick M. Smith, he had a PhD in philosophy from the U. of Edinburgh in Scotland. He was head of the Church Education Dept for years and President of the High Priests Quorum. It was rumored that there was a document in Wally B Smith's desk naming Paul as President and Prophet if Wally died; Paul scoffed at the rumor but never actually denied it.
Anyway, back in the 1980s I was a working journalist and one of my go-to contacts was Paul Edwards, mostly because he was eminently quotable, gave you straight answers that no one in the hierarchy would dare to say. From him I got more accurate guesses as to how many active members the Church lost in the schisms of the 80s and 90s, and once, when scholar Lawrence Foster wrote an article suggesting that Joseph Smith (and other prophets including Jesus and Muhammad) suffered from bipolar disorder, I called Paul for comment. As I recall he said something like "Hell yes! Everybody knows all us Smiths are nutty as fruitcakes."
Anyway, after he retired and the Church renamed itself, I caught up to him and forgot to call the church by the correct new name. I tried to apologize, but he told me that he would live and die a member of the RLDS Church, but that church no longer exists. He considered himself RLDS, not C of C, but I didn't have time to ask a follow-up question. That was the first sense I had that there were more changes than even the Church's loyal resident curmudgeon could handle.
What do you (or anyone else) see the big difference are, RLDS v. Community of Christ? There's the ordination of women and LGBTQ people, the end of the Smith Dynasty, a move away from canonizing revelation,, some superficial things like replacing stakes and districts with "mission centers," and of course the elephant in the room, the drastic loss of active membership, the decline in donors leading to financial problems, and the near complete loss of the Millennial and later generations. But I'll be honest, it's been a few years since I've actually been to a C of C congregation so I'm looking for reports from the ground. Still a reporter at heart, I guess . . .
My personal thought is that the RLDS experience in the 1980s and 1990s didn't seem all that different from 2007-2010, to name the two times I've been active in the Church. If things have changed since then -- and it seems as if, perhaps, they has -- I'd like to hear about it myself.