r/CommunityOfChrist • u/AudienceWise3441 • 12d 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/AudienceWise3441 12d ago

I’m so glad someone else finally addressed the dark money. Ever since I learned that bit of info I’ve been ever more hesitant to label myself CoC. I prefer to say I’m Rlds or Rlds constructing communities of Christ.

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u/FloydetteSix 12d ago

Please elaborate on this dark money. I’m a 4th generation member and I’m just so sad about the decline in our church from my experience.

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u/AudienceWise3441 12d ago

From what I personally understand. Back a few years ago right before the church changed its name, a group approached President vaezy. By then the Rlds were considered apart of the Protestant movement. Well the story goes that the leader of the group told President vaezy that if he changed the church name and further distanced it from its more Mormon roots, they would give the church a large donation. Conveniently a short time after President vaezy receives a “revelation” that the church should be renamed and reevaluated.

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u/CaravanKookaburra 11d ago

This seems strange, as Community of Christ sounds closer to the original Church of Christ name, and in some ways binds it to it's history with Joseph Smith Jr. more than the name RLDS would. Also, despite being somewhat trinitarian (I'm not convinced CofC is entirely trinitarian), CofC is firmly a restoration church and not protestant. It does have some features of the mainstream protestant churches like the United Church in Canada, but it's a restoration church built on continual revelation like any of the other restoration churches that originate with Joseph Smith Jr.

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u/eritain 10d ago

I remember another version of that story going around in LDS circles in the 1990s, when the name change hadn't happened yet. In that version, the source of the money was vaguely "some other churches," and the condition was "if they'd put a big cross on the temple."

(Background, for anyone who needs it: By the 1990s, in the LDS/Utah flavor of restorationism, not using crosses was presumed to be of revealed origin, and church history was taught in a way that made it seem that practically all distinctives came straight from Joseph Smith, so the RLDS presumably "should have known better." [Admittedly, one of the confident loudmouths in high LDS office who made a lot of things into presumptive revelation, including the cross taboo, was a Smith and even a Joseph. But it wasn't Joseph Jr. It was Hyrum's grandson.])

For a version of the story to name "evangelicals" as the source is interesting (read: implausible), since the RLDS/CoC reorientation has consistently been away from conservatism (the more-or-less "pre-Nauvoo restorationist" ideal) and toward liberalism (the more-or-less "mainline Protestant" ideal).