more thoughts on Kirtland (with gratitude for Lach Mackay)

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For as quickly as I felt like I came to peace with the sale of the Kirtland Temple, I’ve had conversations and encounters since yesterday’s post that make it clear that I still have a lot of work to do processing all of this in the weeks, months, and years ahead. I’ve heard from a lot of people in pain: people who have been to Kirtland dozens of times but never want to go again, ordained women in Community of Christ who are angry that the new owners of the temple can’t respect their ordination, and yet more. It would be wrong of me to lean on the peace I’ve come to and not be present for others’ pain. I’ve also seen at least one petty Mormon comment arguing that Community of Christ’s recent history with schism and financial instability is proof of Brighamite superiority (buddy, do I have some bad news about 1830s Kirtland for you!). It would be inaccurate of me to argue that I’ve already fully come to peace when that kind of comment makes me so angry.

At the risk of setting aside all that for a bit more, I wanted to write another, shorter post today. In particular, I wanted to express gratitude for Community of Christ Apostle Lachlan MacKay and his role in making this transfer easier for me (though again, this is nothing more than my telling of my experience, and certainly not an argument that anyone else should feel the way that I do). In addition to his other apostolic duties, Lach oversees everything historical in Community of Christ. In my experience, he is more likely than any other high-ranking leader in Community of Christ to invoke early Restoration history. His take on Joseph Smith’s grove experience (or First Vision) has deeply shaped me, his love for early church history is exemplary, and I owe him a lot.

More than in an abstract sense, he’s been personally helpful to me as part of my faith transition. Let me give an example: My name, “Spencer Greenhalgh,” is a distinctly Mormon name. It’s not inherently Mormon, in the same way that “Mahonri Kimball” might be, but it’s disproportionately Mormon. In Northern Kentucky, where I grew up, there weren’t a lot of Spencers around, and there were even fewer Greenhalghs (none outside of my family, in fact). During the five years I spent in Utah, I was repeatedly surprised by how much more common my name was there. I was one of three Spencers on my dorm floor at BYU—our parents had all been explicitly or implicitly inspired by LDS prophet-president Spencer W. Kimball. More surprising to me was how often I got asked if I was related to the Greenhalghs in such-and-such a small Utah town. This happened when I got my recommend checked going into multiple temples (and, in a fun fact in trivia history, the name was pronounced differently in almost every instance), and it was drilled into me that “Greenhalgh” was a Mormon name in a way I hadn’t realized growing up.

In December of 2019, I was furtively attending the occasional Community of Christ meeting while still keeping up weekly attendance in my local LDS ward. Because my “local” congregation is halfway across the state, most of that furtive meeting attendance was through an online ministry specifically targeted at people from a Mormon background. In December of 2019, Lach was the guest minister for one such meeting. We’d never met before (and my LDS background had given me an impression of “apostles” as on a pedestal way above your everyday member), so I was surprised when he clocked my name and sent me a private message in Zoom to ask:

I think there were Greenhalghs in 1840s Kirtland after the main body moved to Nauvoo. Are you related?

We exchanged a few Zoom messages and an email or two on the topic. In one email, Lach sent me information about an Elizabeth Greenhalgh who, according to an 1885 issue of the Community of Christ official periodical:

came to America in the year 1849, made her home near Kirtland, and for a number of years lived in the hotel opposite the Temple, her husband for a time having control of the Temple property. Hers was a long and eventful life, fraught with the many good deeds that tend to bind together families, neighbors and friends, and leaves in its triumph true evidence that humanity was blessed for this one having lived. For the last three years of her life her afflictions prevented her from going from home, or attending church; but she was glad when the Saints revived their meetings in Kirtland, and was ever ready to speak in their favor.

Despite having four years to do so, I have never taken the time to figure out if I’m actually related to Elizabeth. Whatever the case, though, in a moment where I was feeling trepidation about leaving the Restoration heritage of my ancestors, Lach gave me a way to reframe the question. Sure, there are Greenhalgh connections all over Utah, but there were also Greenhalgh connections in RLDS Kirtland. Yeah, my fellow Mormons recognized my last name as belonging to the community when I visited Utah, but a Community of Christ apostle didn’t even blink before recognizing my name as belonging to the community when I was in the same Zoom meeting as him.

Knowing that Lach has such a firm dedication to the Restoration heritage of Community of Christ, and having depended on him as a guidepost during my own faith transition, I felt like his support of the denomination’s decision to make this transfer made the hard pill somewhat easier to swallow. I only discovered this video reflection from Lach this morning, but I think I value it more than any other resource that the World Church has put out so far. If there’s one person I trust to take this decision seriously, it’s Lach, and his feeling that this was the right decision to make goes a long way toward helping me come to peace with it:

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