Sunday, September 8, 2013

On the 175th Anniversary of the Saints in New Jersey: Lessons Learned


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.

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