Elder Marlin K Jensen, of the first quorum of the Seventy noted in April 2007 conference, when he was serving as the Church historian, that “Remembering enables us to see God’s hand in our past, just as prophecy and faith assure us of God’s hand in our future. . . .Keeping our past alive, . . . connects us to the people, places, and events that make up our spiritual heritage and, in so doing, motivates us to greater service, faith, and kindness.”
Today, I have been asked to speak about
the 175th anniversary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints in New Jersey. Studying that history has helped me to see God’s hand in
our past. Today, I will discuss several of the lessons I have learned as I have
studied that history. I hope that as I share these lessons, you, too, will “see
God’s hand in our past,” and that doing so will not only “connect you to “to
people, places, and events of our” shared “spiritual heritage,” but also that
you will, like I, be “motivated to greater service, faith and kindness.”
Lesson
1: The Lord wants all to have the opportunity to embrace the
gospel.
Samuel H. Smith, the first missionary
began his first mission nearly three months after the organization of the
Church. In February 1832, Elders Orson Pratt, and Lyman E. Johnson, less than
two years after the organization of the Church, set out on a mission that
included New Jersey.
Lesson
2: The Lord organizes his members under the priesthood. That
organization facilitates the growth of the Church and its individual members.
Two missionaries, Benjamin Winchester
and Jedediah Grant were particularly successful in the Pine Barrens of New
Jersey and in October 1838, they organized 28 members in Hornerstown (which is
now part of Upper Freehold) into the first official branch of the Church in New
Jersey. Soon after a branch was organized in Toms River. The next year Parley
P. Pratt organized a branch in Jersey City. Organizing the members into branches
allowed the Church to grow.
The missionaries were successful in New
Jersey, especially in Burlington and Monmouth counties. In 1840, the branch in
Cream Ridge reported 100 members. Even though many who were baptized moved to
join the main body of the Church in Nauvoo, there were nearly 200 members in
Cream Ridge and Toms River in 1842. At one point Erastus Snow preached to a
crowd he estimated to be 1000 people. The members built a meetinghouse in
Hornerstown, and one local historian commented that there was a “Mormon
invasion.”
In fact, in 1848, one year after Brigham
Young arrived in Utah, there were 21 branches of the Church in New Jersey—more
than there were in Utah.
Lesson
3: Every part of the Kingdom of God is important, even New Jersey (the incredulous italics
suggesting how some of our western friends might feel about New Jersey).
During the Nauvoo period, there
appeared to be frequent interchange between the saints in Nauvoo and New
Jersey, which strengthened all the saints. New Jersey saints visited
Nauvoo—William Appleby, a prominent leader in New Jersey, visited Nauvoo in
1841 to perform baptisms for his kindred dead. Missionaries and church leaders from
Nauvoo brought directives from Church leaders. New Jersey saints contributed to
causes in Nauvoo, such as the building of the temple.
In fact, in December of 1839 and
January of 1840, during his trip to Washington, D.C. to seek redress from the
federal government for the Saints’ losses in Missouri, the prophet Joseph Smith
visited several branches in New Jersey. He preached at Cream Ridge and visited
saints in New Egypt, Hornerstown and Toms River. Hundreds listened to the
prophet preach and he baptized many. Dramatically he healed a lame boy.
These events led one historian of Ocean
County to list Joseph Smith’s visit as one of the “eight principal events in
the town’s history. “ Some speculate that Nauvoo, New Jersey, a small fishing
village (now a section of present-day Sea Bright) was named soon after Joseph
Smith’s visit to New Jersey.
Lesson
4: Latter-day Saints can spread their influence by being part
of their communities.
According to one history, at one point
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the principal religion in
Toms River. Prominent church members, such as the Ivins family sought to be a
positive influence. And when Ocean County split from Monmouth County, the
Mormon meetinghouse was used as the county courthouse.
Lesson
5: The Church is strengthened when Church members heed the counsel
of their prophets and apostles.
Latter-day Saints in the second half of
the 19th-century heeded the counsel of their leaders to gather to
Zion in the Rocky Mountain West. By 1846, Brigham Young had issued the call to
immigrate west. Hundreds of New Jersey
Saints heeded that call. Among those
were John Horner and Elizabeth Imlay, who left New Jersey the day after their
marriage to join Samuel Brannan, and the saints traveling west via the ship Brooklyn. I confess I would hardly
consider a six-month voyage with 238 saints in those close quarters a fit
honeymoon cruise.
After his father, who was not a member
of the Church died, Anthony Ivins, formed a company of saints from Toms River.
Together the small band traveled by train and steamboat to Independence and
then crossed in plains arriving in Utah in August 1853. Ivins’ son Anthony
Woodward, not yet a year old, would later serve twenty-seven years in the
Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the First Presidency.
I am certain the youth of our stake,
who only two months ago participated in a reenactment of the handcart trek, appreciate
the sacrifice of Augustus Embley Pearce and his wife Caroline Pullen Pearce
from Burlington County and their eight children ranging in age from an infant
to 15. In Nebraska, the family joined the Daniel Robison company, the second to
last company to pull handcarts. Their youngest child, Georgeanna, was only two
months old when they started the 1,030 miles trek across the plains on June 6,
1860.
And just as the early saints heeded the
prophet’s call to gather to Zion, so 20th-century saints heeded
later prophets who urged them to build up Zion in New Jersey. In 1918 and 1922
the Hoboken and Newark Branches were organized and by 1933, Heber J. Grant, whose
mother was a New Jersey native and his father a missionary to New Jersey, came
to New Jersey to dedicate the first church-owned building in New Jersey, a
former termite-ridden former recreational clubhouse rebuilt by the 200 members
of the Newark branch. (That building was later demolished in the 1950s to make
way for the Garden State Parkway.)
It was the efforts of these saints, who
also followed the prophet’s counsel, that allow us to now enjoy the association
of our fellow 33,000 saints in New Jersey today.
Lesson
6: Latter-day Saints should persist in being prepared.
For many New Jersey saints the journey
to Utah was daunting. These saints first needed to raise the means to get to
the Midwest in order to join a pioneer company. Often it took months or years
to prepare. And some never lived to make the trek, but many prepared
nonetheless. As one historian noted:
A singular condition
of affairs in several homes there was that some of the furniture and household
goods which had been made ready for packing, years previously, in anticipation
of removing to Salt Lake, still remained in the same condition, hoping that
they would yet be called to join their brethren in that western city of the
Saints. But for some of them that time never came.
Andrew Scott Hunter provides an example
of the persistence required to prepare for the journey west. During a visit to
Nauvoo in 1845 to attend the temple, he was counseled by Brigham Young to
prepare for the journey west. He returned home to New Jersey to settle his business.
Unfortunately only a few weeks before he was to depart for the west, he was
felled by a severe illness. By the time he was well, all his funds had been
expended in caring for his family during his illness.
Determined to earn the funds for the
journey, he began another business and in a few years had once again prepared
to depart. When he returned from a trip to Philadelphia, he discovered that his
wife had left him, stripping everything of value from his home. Undaunted, he
sold what his wife had not taken and with his two children joined a company of
Philadelphia saints on their journey west.
Lesson
7: The sacrifice of faithful Latter-day Saints can have immeasurable
impact on all the members of the Church.
Perhaps my favorite story is that of
New Jersey native Rachel Ridgeway Ivins Grant. When she was 20, at the urging
of a friend, Rachel, a Baptist, went to hear Joseph Smith preach at Cream
Ridge. Though she found the prophet to be a “fine, noble looking man . . . so
neat,” she was not at all impressed with his sermon. After she returned at her
friend’s urging to hear Joseph Smith a second time, she prayed for forgiveness
for listening to false doctrine on the Sabbath. Yet she continued to attend
meetings, and eventually she read the Book
of Mormon, which so captivated her, she completed it in a single night. She
embraced the gospel.
In the spring of 1842, she moved to
Nauvoo, but after Joseph Smith’s death she returned home to Toms River where
she lived for the next nine years. Finally, at age 32, she traveled with her
cousin Anthony Ivins to Utah. Two years after arriving in Utah she married
Jedediah Grant, whom she had met 16 years earlier when he had been a missionary
in New Jersey.
After only one year and two months of
marriage, Jedediah died of typhoid and pneumonia, leaving Rachel a widow, in
poor health following a difficult childbirth. Her son Heber was only nine days
old. Her nonmember relatives urged her to return to New Jersey, promising to
meet all her financial needs if she would return to New Jersey, leaving behind
the Church. Instead, despite her abject poverty, she chose to raise her son,
Heber Jedediah Grant, the seventh president of the Church, in Utah with the
saints.
Lesson
8: In fulfilling my callings, I really have no reason to
complain.
For the past 24 years I have visit
taught or been visit taught by Sister Marion Van Uitert, who moved to
Morristown with her husband LeGrande nearly 60 years ago. Whenever I am tempted
to complain about the distance I have to travel or the time an assignment will
take, I recall her tales of yore.
In particular I remember the “extra miles”
it took for her to magnify her callings. Frequently she was required her to go
into New York City for regular stake leadership meetings. These regular treks into the city were made in
the days before Accu-weather forecasts. After
one such evening meeting, she did not return home until the next morning. She
and her fellow travelers had been caught in a sudden, severe snowstorm
necessitating their spending the entire night slowly creeping along the highway
home.
Lesson
9: I am grateful that I can I worship in the Morristown Stake
Center each Sunday.
Many years ago I heard Al Rust describe
stories of building this chapel, which was dedicated in 1978. In those days
members not only raised the funds for their buildings, but they also donated
their time to build the buildings. I remember his story about I am grateful
that he and other members, undoubtedly President Jones included, laid brick
upon brick and painted stroke after stroke to create a building in which I can
worship each Sunday.
All of these lessons humble me. I hope
they humble you as well. At times, we Latter-day Saints view our history and
the growth of our Church in a self-congratulatory manner, patting ourselves on
our backs, as we calculate statistics to chart the wondrous progress we have
made in 175 years.
But 175 years is nothing.
As we consider the vast history of the
world and the endlessness of eternity, we should be humble. When the
Lord revealed to Moses the entire history of the world Moses was dumbfounded: “Now,
for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had
supposed.” Moses was both surprised and
humbled when he saw the vastness of history and eternity. And yet the Lord reminded him a few verses
later that all of this, the worlds without number, was for him and for us in
verse 39 when he stated that “This is my work and my glory to bring to pass the
immortality of man.”
That we may humbly remember our place
in God’s plan, which end is to bring us eternal life, I pray, in the name of
Jesus Christ, Amen.
