August 29, 2018 Show with Peter Elliott on “Reasons for Disbelief: One Man’s Story of Leaving the RLDS (Community of Christ Church)”

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 29th day of August 2018, and I'm delighted to have on the program for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Peter Elliott.

He is a convert from out of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the RLDS, and today known as the Community of Christ. This is actually part two of a three-part series that we are doing on the RLDS cult.

We began on Monday with Paul Trask as our guest. He is another convert from out of the RLDS to biblical Christianity, and today our guest is Peter Elliott. We do intend next week to have another RLDS convert from out of that group to biblical Christianity, and her name is Carol Hansen, and we're looking forward to that interview, God willing, with her next week.

But today, as I said, we have as our guest today for the very first time Peter Elliott, and he is the author of a book, A Church's History and Theology Led to Reasons for Disbelief, One Man's Story of Leaving the RLDS Community Church of Christ, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for the very first time, Peter Elliott.

Thanks for that, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here. And also, co-hosting the program with me today is Pastor Jason Wallace, pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah, and also founder of LDS .Video.

It's great to have you back on the program, Pastor Jason Wallace. Although you've been a guest on this program a number of times, is this the first time that you've co-hosted with me? Yes. And it's great to have you as a part of this program, even though you're, when it comes to the cults, being a resident of Magna, Utah, not far from Salt Lake City, obviously your focus of attention is the larger group, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, and you have dedicated an evangelistic effort to them through LDS .Video, but it's glad that you would join us today to probably learn a lot yourself for the first time about the RLDS, but tell us about Christ Presbyterian Church of Magna, Utah.

We're a.

Congregation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We try to be aggressive in outreach. Great, and.

We'll be repeating that information later on, God willing. But, Peter Elliott, you are from a fifth generation of members of the RLDS, and yet you live in Australia, in Western Australia. The RLDS, as you know, is most commonly known to citizens of Missouri, because of the fact that that is where they are most prevalent, and they obviously found their way over the last hundred years or so to Western Australia.

Tell us about how the RLDS migrated.

Over there, to your knowledge. Well, my family connection goes back really to the first Mormon mission to England, which took place in 1840, when the original leader, Joseph Smith, was still alive. I had an ancestor by the name of Francis White, who apparently converted to Mormonism during that first mission to England.

He subsequently moved to Western Australia, and his descendants stayed within the church, but eventually, through the development and the split between the Utah Mormons and the RLDS, they eventually affiliated with the RLDS.

My family had been part of the RLDS ever since that time, so there were five generations before me. I was generation number six, and that was really a key part of the RLDS in Western Australia.

Now, would you have been, growing up, a real outsider in your own homeland? I mean, were there, other than your own congregation, were there other RLDS folks that you knew and had fellowship with, or what was the situation like there?

Yeah, in one way, we were outsiders. There were really only two branches within the Perth metropolitan area. There was the Fremantle branch, which I attended, and there was a branch that was called Woodlands Branch, and they were really the only two branches in our whole state.

When you say branch, would that be similar to the way some denominations use the word parish?

Yes, it would be similar to a parish. Okay. So, that was my family connection.

And so, being that long in that group, I'm sure that this was a very heartfelt and cherished religion for your family since you were in it so long. Tell us something about growing up RLDS, as far as perhaps stories that you heard from your parents and grandparents about the movement, or even things that you did as a family that were uniquely RLDS, things that your average family in Australia would not have participated in, or things that the average family in Australia, whether they were Christian or not, participated in that you did not in a reverse way.

Tell us.

Something about that. In some ways, our family would have looked very similar to a lot of other church families, I think. You would have walked into a lot of our services and not been able to tell too much difference from walking into most mainline denominations.

There weren't that many mentions of the church distinctives publicly all that often, but they were definitely there. My grandfather was the pastor of the church in Fremantle for many years. My stepfather, when my mother remarried, was also the pastor of the church in his time.

My mother was a church organist for 32 years. So, we're very much involved in it. The distinctives were mainly defining us against the LDS group and emphasising the differences between the two groups.

In terms of what we did or didn't do, I think most of the people in the church took a stance against alcohol, so we tended not to drink alcohol. But apart from that, there weren't any distinctive practices.

We didn't do anything as colourful as the LDS group and have underwear with magic symbols on it. And we didn't particularly have an affinity for bicycles.

So, I'm sure that those of our listeners who missed Monday's show with Paul Trask, who actually, for those of our listeners who missed that program, Paul Trask founded a ministry called Refiners Fire Ministry, and they publish a number of books about the RLDS.

It's the only Christian ministry I know of that has a major emphasis on the RLDS, and they actually make available this book that we are talking about today, Reasons for Disbelief, One Man's Story of Leaving the RLDS Community of Christ Church by Peter Elliott.

But for those of our listeners who missed Monday, if you could tell us about some of the major differences. In fact, let's back up a little bit. Before we get the major differences on the RLDS and the LDS, the RLDS and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, the major group from Salt Lake.

Tell us about how the group initially split, and then we will get into some of the major differences. And of course, those of you who heard Monday's program with Paul Trask, there may be some overlap, but of course, Peter Elliott may also bring to light things that we didn't have time to address on Monday.

So, if you could, start with where the split came.

Sure. The split really originally came when Joseph Smith, the founder, died in 1844 at the age of 39. And so the split initially happened over the issue of who was the correct leader to succeed Joseph.

Now, Brigham Young, as key amongst the apostles, there was a group that felt that Brigham should be the leader to take over after Joseph. But there was another group that felt that Joseph had appointed his son, also called Joseph, who became known as Joseph Smith III, as his successor.

The problem was, at the time of Joseph Smith's death in 1844, his son was only aged about 12, so clearly not in a position to take leadership of anything. But the group that felt that Joseph had really anointed his son for the role really became the RLDS.

So they waited, effectively, until such time as the son was old enough to decide whether or not he wanted to take over from his father. He did do that, and then the reorganized church formed some years later as a result of Joseph Smith Jr.'s son taking on the father's mantle, as it were.

In the meantime, of course, the group following Brigham Young had moved over to Utah and became the LDS group. So the original split was over.

That issue of succession. Paul. And there are major differences between the two religions that actually make them, in many ways, entirely different religions that have some similarities. I would say the same thing, for instance, about evangelical Christianity, historic reformational Protestantism at the branch of the church to which I belong.

I would say that the Roman Catholic Church is an entirely different religion that has a lot of similarities, but they have differences that are too significant to claim that they are the same religion, because especially the gospel is different.

But in the same way, I would say, from what I know of the differences between the RLDS and the LDS, that the differences are so significant that they would be really two entirely different religions. Would you agree with that, Peter?

Peter I think there's a huge amount of similarity. Well, as you've said about Roman Catholics and evangelicals, there's obviously a huge amount of similarity, but there are also some significant differences.

So I would agree along those lines. The other interesting thing about the RLDS is, in more recent times, how they've changed. So you've got your historic differences, which we'll talk about, but you've also got how the RLDS has positioned themselves relative to those original historic distinctives in the last 40 or 50 years.

So I might go back to the original historic distinctives, which are particularly around, I think, three main areas of doctrine, and those main areas are polygamy, baptism for the dead, and plurality of gods.

So when I was growing up, they were three things that were seen as being very much keeping us apart from, and really justifying our continued separate existence from, the LDS Utah group. My grandfather, who was a pastor, as I said, for many years, would always identify himself as a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not the Mormons.

These were, at that stage, back in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, the key differences. So polygamy, baptism for the dead, and plurality of gods were the big three.

And yes, well, that is a huge difference, because it's obviously one of the huge differences that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has with Christianity, is the area of monotheism. Christians are monotheistic.

We believe in the Trinity, and the Trinity, as everyone who is a Christian, has some familiarity with the fact that it is the teaching that God is one God and three co-eternal and yet distinctive persons that are co-equal.

And the Mormons believe not only are there an unlimited number, an infinite number of gods, they believe they can become one of them if they are faithful. So that is a huge difference, that doctrine of progression, which you are saying also separates the RLDS from the LDS.

That's right, Chris. So the version that I was taught growing up, taking that issue of plurality of gods, was that really plurality of gods was something that hadn't been taught by Joseph Smith and was really something that was a later development from that really bad lot that went over to Utah, was what I was taught.

Now, we can get onto this in a minute if you want, but subsequently my own investigation proved that really what I'd been taught as a child growing up in the RLDS about Joseph having nothing to do with that really wasn't correct.

Yes, and in fact, that would go along with the polygamy as well. I know that the RLDS, I don't know if they've come to admit it in recent history, but from what I understand, the RLDS adamantly denied that Joseph Smith was a polygamist himself, nor did he advocate it.

And there is irrefutable evidence of that that has arose during the centuries since the Mormon church began, that he was certainly a polygamist. Am I right on that, that the RLDS denied that there was any connection between Joseph and polygamy?

Yes, that's true. That certainly was the version that I grew up with. The interesting thing is the divergence between the versions that I was taught, my parents and grandparents were taught, and what later came to be gradually admitted, although never really publicly taught and published, by the leadership of the church in Independence, Missouri.

So, as part of my own investigation during the 1979 -1980 period, I was in correspondence with, particularly Richard Howard, who was at the time the RLDS church historian. And in the book that you referred to earlier, I quote from some of Richard's correspondence, and it was becoming obvious to me that some of the stuff that I was discovering, which of course was sometimes based on primary documents, but sometimes based on the work of others like the Tanners, for example, the RLDS leadership in the 1970s -80s period was actually coming to accept some of the real difficulties of the traditional positions that held on these three doctrines, and really coming to, I guess, something of a revisionist understanding of that, but not really coming.

Out and publicly telling the people of that. Now, can you repeat what you just said? There was a little bit of distortion from the Skype audio, but are you saying that the RLDS in the 1970s started to become more assimilated to historic Christianity in their teachings?

Is that.

What you were saying? No, no, I'm definitely not saying that. What I am saying is that they were really, the leadership of the church in that period was really revising its understanding of some of these historical teachings about those big three doctrines, and essentially, in many ways, coming to agree more with the historic claims of the LDS group in Utah.

Oh, okay, the reverse of what I thought I heard.

Yes, exactly.

Okay, but even so, they never adopted, from what I understand, they never adopted the progression to godhood, or, obviously, by the 1970s, nobody was practicing polygamy in either of the groups. But what do you mean by the other teachings, as far as assimilating more to the LDS.

Understanding? In terms of, say, baptism for the dead, one of the things that I've been taught growing up was that baptism for the dead had never really been practiced. It was something that had been foreshadowed.

It was something that had been discussed as going to take place in the Nauvoo Temple when the Nauvoo Temple was eventually completed. But because the Nauvoo Temple wasn't completed, the original RLDS view was that the conditions for baptism for the dead were never actually met, and so it didn't actually take place.

Now, certainly in later years, the RLDS historians like Richard Howard, their investigations came to show up exactly the opposite, and that baptism for the dead had been practiced in the river, and it had also been practiced in a makeshift font in the Nauvoo Temple itself, I think.

So that was one of the issues. The other one was the polygamy issue had been maintained for many years, that Joseph had never been involved in that, and his widow Emma had apparently always denied it.

But again, as you've said, the evidence came forth, and the reorganized church leaders saw that and appreciated the weight of the evidence. But one of the issues I had with the RLDS leadership back in the 80s was that they never actually came clean, if you like, and published their findings in a way that was accessible to the general membership of the RLDS church.

They hid his polygamy. They hid Joseph's polygamy, you're saying. Yeah, so polygamy, baptism for the dead, and plurality of gods, they never really published the views that they had come to hold as the leaders of the RLDS church, which was that Joseph had really been involved in all of these things.

So that cut to an issue of honesty.

And integrity. And I guess that was one of the areas where your faith in the RLDS system began.

To crack. It was, it was indeed, because my correspondence with Richard Howard and subsequent correspondence between both—you know, my mother got extremely distressed by what I was discovering, and much to my surprise, actually, sent a copy of my book.

I mean, we only ever printed two dozen copies for local distribution, in my mind, of the first print run. And she sent a copy of that to the leaders of the church in 1980 with a please explain letter.

So it was an interesting way of instigating a correspondence between us and the church leaders. But one of the things that came out of that correspondence, when we challenged them as to why they weren't publishing the views that they now held, was the response that they really had—their words were—a long-range plan to change the thinking of the people of the church.

So for us, that just sounded like brainwashing.

Yeah, and Jason Wallace, you had a question for our guest today, Peter Elliott.

I was curious, with your family being among the early—if in that interim period from 1844—.

Not as far as I know, Jason, no.

And could you tell us, Jason, about that group, that branch or sect splinter group of the Mormons?

Sure. Obviously, there were many people who didn't go along, and he ends up moving. He soon claimed when he died, many of the group—. Fascinating. Well, we're going back now to—or.

Should I say we are entering into—our first station break. If anybody has a question that they would like to ask of our guest, Peter Elliott, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com—chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Let's say you are a member of the RLDS and you want to disagree with our guest and you don't want to draw attention to yourself. I understand that. Or perhaps you're a member of the RLDS and you're questioning that group yourself, and you don't want to come out of the closet, as it were, yet.

Well, we can understand why there might be a number of reasons why you'd remain anonymous. But if it's not a personal and private matter, please, as always, give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence, if you live outside the USA.

And we look forward to hearing from you. In fact, we already have a number of people waiting patiently for their questions to be asked and answered. And we will get to as many of you as we can, as time will allow.

But don't go away, God willing, we'll be right back with Peter Elliott and more of our discussion on his conversion out from the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into Biblical Christianity.

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Chris. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with a half hour that we just already had with 90 minutes to go, our guest is Peter Elliott.

Peter Elliott grew up in the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and spent most of his early 20s traveling the world, living off tin fish and yogurt, gold prospecting, and escaping from government jobs.

Since then, he has earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from the West Australian Institute of Technology, now Curtin University, and a Bachelor of Divinity and a Master's in Theology, both from Murdoch University.

Most recently, Peter has submitted a doctoral thesis entitled Edward Irving, Romantic Theology in Crisis at Murdoch University, which we hope to interview Peter on in the future. Peter lectures in church history in several colleges, and lives near Fremantle, Western Australia with his wife Debra and their two sons Joel and Jason, and we are discussing his book Reasons for Disbelief, one man's story of leaving the RLDS community of Christ's Church.

And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com chrisarnzen at gmail .com, and our co-host today, with me to discuss this issue today, is Pastor Jason Wallace of Christ Presbyterian Church, which is a congregation in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church denomination in Magna, Utah, not far from Salt Lake City.

He is also founder and director of LDS .video. Well, Peter, tell us more about how the crumbling history, or the revealing of the falsities, the cover-ups and lies about the RLDS church history, began to draw you more and more away from them, and eventually into Biblical, historical.

Christianity. Sure, Chris. I think one of the key things for me in doing the research that I did, and I might just backtrack a little bit as to how I started that research. As I said, I grew up in the RLDS church, and one of the similarities between the RLDS and the LDS is how they call their priesthood members.

So one day you get a tap on your shoulder from the pastor who says, I believe God's calling you to the office of priest or teacher or deacon, whatever it is, and then you're supposed to pray about that and then come back with your answer, yes or no.

Now, I started to see people who were younger than me in my branch getting called to priesthood offices, and I was getting a bit nervous. I thought one day the tap is going to come on my shoulder. Now, my stepfather was the pastor at that time, and I probably wasn't leading the most regular of lives as a young guy.

That might have bought me a bit of time, but I knew one day that that tap on my shoulder was going to come. So a friend of mine had an opportunity to travel overseas for an extended period of time, and he asked me to go with him.

I took that opportunity, realizing that what I needed to do really—and bear in mind this time when I'm 20, 21, I still believe that the RLDS teachings were probably completely true, but the one thing I didn't want was to just accept because five generations of family.

I wanted to have my own testimony, my own faith, and I realized that the RLDS and LDS churches made historic claims, and I realized that I could actually investigate those. For me, that meant I needed to get access to some materials that were not readily available in Western Australia.

So when I traveled overseas, I made sure I got to Independence, Missouri, and I got into the archives there, started a friendship with the librarian, and started getting hold of a lot of material that I would later bring back to Perth and start researching.

So that's really where it all began. When I got back to Perth around the end of 1979, I started researching this material. One of the interesting things I came across was something called the position papers.

Now, this is completely RLDS, nothing to do with the LDS, but it's a very interesting turning point for the official position, if you like, of the RLDS church. What was happening was in the late 1960s, around 1967, the RLDS church was developing what it called its new curriculum.

In other words, what are we going to teach people in our churches? And as part of that, they developed these positions on all of the historical distinctives of the reorganized church. And just to give you a couple of those—and by the way, these position papers were never intended to be made public, but they got leaked out.

So in these position papers, for example, they actually discount the historicity of the Book of Mormon itself. And they also discount the so-called inspired version, which was the scriptures that the RLDS used in preference to the King James, which the LDS used.

So basically, you've got the leaders of the church preparing in private these position papers that are completely taking a different view on their major distinctives from what had been taught previously.

And it's going to form the basis for what the church is teaching during the 1970s. So when these papers got leaked out, it caused a bit of a controversy, and it was a further step in me realizing that effectively, church leadership was making changes of direction,.

But they were not openly communicating that to the members. Wow. We have some questions from listeners. First of all, quite an interesting individual. We have Steve, and Steve is from West Boylston, Massachusetts.

And what makes Steve interesting, I'm going to give actually his full name and his church, because Steve has been a guest on this program in the past, as has his senior pastor. Steve is associate pastor at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts.

And just for a quick plug for him, the website is bbcchurch .org, and also nocompromiseradio .com. But Steve Cooley was a Mormon. He's a Mormon convert to biblical Christianity, not a convert from the RLDS, but from the LDS.

And Steve has a few questions here, actually. First of all, he asks, is the RLDS engaged in missionary work like the LDS? So my understanding is yes, it is.

But as I think I might have mentioned in an earlier comment, that I think predominantly now they are focusing their efforts probably in third world regions. But the difference is that they've never had the same sort of system that the LDS have, where there's an expectation that young people will spend a certain period of time as full-time missionaries.

That's never been part of the RLDS focus. And I think that the fact that they have taken really a revisionist stance on their historic beliefs really puts them in an awkward position. They're now effectively offering people what is really not much different from, say, some liberal form of Protestantism, with an interesting historical twist to it, let's say.

Yeah, you're talking about the current.

Community of Christ. Correct. And Steve also says, I remember the RLDS seems to be less adverse to the physical symbol of the cross. Is that true?

I didn't really notice much response to that either way. In the RLDS church that I grew up in, there was a plain cross symbol on the back of the church, yeah. And that would never be the.

Case in an LDS temple or chapel ward, I should say, or temple for that matter. Yeah, yeah. He also asks, Steve asks, does the RLDS have temples? No. Well, they've got a site for the.

Temple in Independence, Missouri, and they've built something on it, but nothing in the way the temple is understood in LDS. So, in terms of the LDS history of basically plagiarizing Masonic ritual for their temple ritual, there's nothing like that.

And Steve's final question is,.

Does the RLDS give the same deference to the Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, and Book of Mormon as the LDS? Yes and no. It's a complicated question.

As part of the position papers previously mentioned, back in as early as the 1960s, the RLDS leaders were really discounting the historicity of the Book of Mormon. So, if you ask them, do they regard it as scripture, they will probably say yes, but how they interpret that would be, I think, very different from the LDS version.

The Doctrine and Covenants, they have a separate one, so they still would consider the Doctrine and Covenants as scripture, but of course they've had their own succession of presidents, you know, prophets of the church, so they have some revelations in their Doctrine and Covenants that have come since the split, so are therefore completely different from the LDS Doctrine and.

Covenants. And I overlooked one final question here. Is the RLDS growing or shrinking? Has the internet impacted the RLDS as it has the LDS?

Yeah, I think this is really a question for Paul Trask, but Paul and I and your other guests coming up, Carol Hanson, have had discussions on this in recent years. The funny thing is that the continues to quote the figure of membership of 250 ,000, but it's been quoting that figure for about 40 years, and it's never changed.

It must be the only organization in church history that's been going for so long, and the membership has never either increased or decreased officially. I'm being a bit facetious in saying that. The membership has definitely declined, but they're just not releasing the figures by how much, but if you look at some of the recent developments in terms of church finances, then it's becoming pretty obvious that the RLDS is.

Struggling. Well thank you Steve, and thank you for giving me your full mailing address, because you have won a free copy of Reasons for Disbelief by Peter Elliot, and we will have cvbbs .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, ship that out to you, and no charge to you or to us, and we also want to thank again Paul Trask and Refiners Fire Ministries for providing us with these books.

We have, let's see, we have another question. In fact, what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask this question, and then I'm going to have you answer it when we come back from our break, and I'll even forward you the question, Peter, so you have it right in front of you as well, so that you could read it during the station break that we are about to enter into.

But Mike from Florida here, let's see, he's from Lee County, Florida, city of Cape Coral, and Mike says, where I live here in Lee County, Florida City of Cape Coral, is a Community of Christ church. Do you have any tracks that I could leave at their building?

They moved into a larger facility about three years ago, so I'm assuming that they're growing in numbers. Special shout out to Jason Wallace of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah.

Thank you for your ministry. So you have a fan out there in Florida, Jason. But I'm going to have you answer that, Peter, when we come back from the break, and if anybody else would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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