(Shortened Version for newspaper)

By James E. Kerns

Latter-day Saints have cause to celebrate:  December 23^rd is the 200^th birthday of their church’s founder, Joseph Smith.  They’ve been celebrating all year, holding extravaganzas of dance, music, and plays.

Joseph Smith was only a 14-year-old farm boy in New York when he emerged from a grove of trees one spring day and announced that he had seen the Father and the Son.  His family believed him.  The ministers of religion in his local area did not.  They united in a common persecution of the otherwise obscure boy.

Joseph had gone to the woods to pray to know which church to join.  He reported that a pillar of light appeared over his head which descended gradually until it rested upon him.  Two Personages, “whose brightness and glory defy all description,” stood above him in the air.  One called him by name, pointing to the other, and said, “This is My Beloved Son.  Hear Him!”

Joseph asked the Personages which church he should join.  He was answered that he should join none of them because, “They teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.”

It was statements like this which got Joseph into trouble with professors of religion.  It lead to his arrest upon dozens of occasions, illegal incarcerations, being tarred and feathered, and finally to being shot to death by an angry mob when he was just 38.

The church he founded—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—is the fastest growing church in the world.  It presently has over 12-million members and is the second largest Christian denomination in Oregon.  Half of its membership lives outside the United States.

The Church’s growth, according to Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, is its biggest problem.  Growth necessitates new meetinghouses, of which the Church is building more than one a day.  Growth also necessitates trained local leadership.  The Church has no paid ministry, so leaders must be selected from among local congregations.  Those leaders might be new members themselves.

The growth comes from an army of missionaries fanned out over most of the world.  Over 51,000, the majority of which are young men between the ages of 19 and 21, are currently serving the Church.  Each is expected to pay his own way—a commitment costing two years and over $10,000.

Why do they do it?

It is because they believe the Church to be the Lord’s true Church, and because they believe Joseph’s story about seeing God and Jesus Christ in that grove of trees in 1820.  They would also say that they’re serving because they believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.  They’re attempting to “flood the earth” with this new book of scripture which they hold to be as authoritative as the Bible.

The Book of Mormon was Joseph Smith’s doing, too.  Three years after the visitation of the Father and the Son, Joseph was visited by an angel named Moroni.  Moroni was the last prophet to have lived among a branch of Israelites in the Americas 1400 years earlier.  He told Joseph that the records of his people were written upon golden plates buried in a hill not far from Joseph’s home.

During the first of Moroni’s many visits to Joseph, he told the then 17-year-old boy that his “name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people.”

Moroni’s prophecy is well on its way to fulfillment.  It’s difficult to find anyone in this country who hasn’t heard his name, and who doesn’t have an opinion, for good or for evil, about him.

Moroni gave Joseph the golden plates and the means to translate them.  He produced a 531-page book which has now been translated into over a hundred languages with over 108-million copies.  It was recently included as one of the 20 most influential books ever published in America.

The Book of Mormon purports to be an abridgment of over a thousand years of records kept by prophets who lived in the Americas.  The abridgment was made by Moroni’s father, Mormon—hence the book’s name.

The highlight of the book is the account of Christ’s visit to America following His crucifixion.  The central figure throughout the book is Jesus—hence the book’s subtitle, “Another Testament of Jesus Christ.”

Says President Hinckley, “I cannot understand why the Christian world does not accept this book.  I would think they would be looking for anything and everything that would establish without question the reality and the divinity of the Savior of the world.”

Joseph Smith, and the book he produced, have been hugely controversial.  The Book of Mormon was published in 1830.  It was translated in about 90 days.  Most of the work was done with Oliver Cowdery acting as scribe.  Joseph read the plates aloud while Oliver wrote.

Oliver and ten others were shown the plates.  Six of them, Oliver included, were eventually excommunicated.  That six of the eleven witnesses left the Church would at first seem a disastrous blow to Joseph’s work.  But the fact that not one of them denied his testimony, and that several asked for rebaptism makes their testimonies all the more compelling.  Had Joseph’s works and claims been a fraud, their disaffections from the Church should have proven a ripe opportunity for exposure.

Joseph and his older brother, Hyrum, were shot to death by a masked mob at Carthage, Illinois on 27 June 1844.  The Church has moved beyond the era of armed mobs, and is now respected for the vast amounts of humanitarian aid it provides to victims of disasters around the world.  Nearly a billion dollars of such aid has been given in the past two decades.

The Church’s growth and success are a modern-day phenomenon and a surprise to its critics.  Would Joseph Smith be surprised to see the state of the Church on this 200^th anniversary of his birth?

Probably not.

“You know no more concerning the destinies of this Church and kingdom than a babe upon its mother’s lap,” he told a small gathering in the Church’s early days.  “You don’t comprehend it…This Church will fill North and South America—it will fill the world.”

Given the Church’s progress thus far, one might wonder.