The word consecrate means in its origins to declare something as sacred and set it apart or dedicate it to a cause. The law of consecration is mentioned in the Holy Bible and often misinterpreted by the people of the world. In this presentation, we consider both the law and covenant of consecration as revealed by the Almighty and as part of the restoration of the gospel. There was a strong movement among the Campbellites headed by a prominent preacher in the area by the name of Sidney Rigdon and the Campbellites grew in prominence in in northeastern Ohio in around Kirtland, Mentor and other areas in Northeastern Ohio. or Ohio.
Among those families that followed Sidney Rigdon was a family by the name of Isaac and Lucy Morley. The Morleys owned a large farm that eventually grew to as large as 300 acres just on the outskirts of Kirtland. basing their practice in the New Testament, in the book of Acts, where it says they had all things common. And these people were trying to live New Testament Christianity.
So they shared everything, lived communally, and everyone lived on the Isaac Morley farm. In regards to the Morley farm, Josiah Jones said this, for nearly two years past, Isaac Morley had contended that in order to restore the ancient order of things in the church of Christ, It was necessary that there should be a community of goods among the brethren, and, accordingly, a number of them were moved to his house and farm, and built houses, and worked, and lived together, and composed what is here called the Big Family, which at this time consisted of perhaps fifty or sixty old and young. Levi Hancock describes going to the Morley Farm one day, and while he was there, a man by the name of Hemmon Bassett comes up to him and asks about Levi's pocket watch and inquires about the pocket watch and then walks off with Levi's watch.
When Levi later asked, can I have my watch back, and said, I sold it. I needed money and we have all things common. What's mine is yours.
What's yours is mine. I thought it was all in the family. And Levi said, I did not like such family doings. He went to the prophet Joseph Smith and inquired, is this will of the Lord intends by having all things common?
The history of the church records the following of these events. The plan of common stock, which had existed in what was called the family, whose members generally had embraced the everlasting gospel, was readily abandoned for the more perfect law of the Lord, and the false spirits were easily discerned and rejected by the light of revelation. The church was called to move to the Ohio to join those saints already there. Shortly after Joseph came to Kirtland, Edward Partridge was called as the first bishop, and the Lord revealed the law of consecration.
Edward Partridge was called as the church's first bishop, and he was charged with administering the Lord's law. So he is tasked with administering the law of consecration as it was practiced in Ohio, and then subsequently when he moves to Missouri to practice it there. The law of consecration is given to the church in February of 1831 in a revelation that Joseph receives after he and a group of elders has petitioned the Lord with various questions. including what the law should be for the saints as they're preparing to establish a gathering place.
And the Lord reveals what is now section 42, which contains the law of consecration at that time. Now, one of the things that we need to remember is that the caring for the poor is something that's very important to our Heavenly Father. And he has given Joseph Smith revelations before February of 1831. dealing with how important it is for church members to care for the poor.
And so when the law of consecration is revealed, it's essentially a law that is given to the saints by which they can both care for the poor and generate enough money for land purchases in Zion, where they would be establishing Zion. That's kind of the primary purpose behind the law of consecration. So section 42 outlines the principles.
Is the first revelation outlining the principles for how the law of consecration would be lived in this dispensation? It includes the consecrating all that these individuals had to the bishop, to the Lord, through the bishop, and then receiving back from the bishop a stewardship according to their family circumstances, wants, and needs. And that would be the beginning of consecration in Kirtland.
Generally, only those saints living in Missouri, where the saints were trying to establish Zion, really were trying to live the law of consecration to its full means. There were elements of the law of consecration prevalent in Ohio, where the headquarters of the church was at the time, but the full law of consecration really isn't lived by any saints living in Ohio. It's only by those saints in Missouri. So we sometimes have the feeling that the saints took all their property, they gave all of their possessions to Edward Partridge, and then Edward Partridge went through and allotted them back a certain number of possessions or whatever else. But that's not really how it operated in Missouri.
The way that it was supposed to operate. was this. In order to go to Missouri and help build up the city of Zion, you had to be called to do so. So you had to be appointed either by a conference of elders or by Joseph Smith himself. When you receive that call to go to Missouri, you were also supposed to obtain a recommend from Newell K. Whitney, who was the bishop in Ohio, or again from a conference of elders.
You would then take that recommend to Missouri with you, you would give it to Edward Partridge, it would show him that you were a member in good standing, and then he would be comfortable with you being grafted into the law of consecration. Now before you went to Missouri, you were supposed to have sold all of your land because you weren't going to need it wherever you were living. And so you would sell that land, you would get the money for the land, and then when you got to Missouri, you would give Edward Partridge that money. And Partridge in return would give you back an assignment or a deed for land in Missouri. So Edward Partridge was in charge of purchasing all the land in Missouri, and he would then allocate it to the people who came to him with the recommend and who provided him with money from the sale of their own lands.
That's primarily how it worked in Missouri. So the money that you brought, when someone came to the land and they gave money to Edward Partridge. That was used to then purchase more land and to take care of the poor. And the major way that the poor were to be taken care of were in storehouses. And the church had two storehouses by 1832. There was a Newell K. Whitney's store that he had in Kirtland, Ohio.
Sidney Gilbert, who had been Newell K. Whitney's partner, in a store in Ohio. was called to move to Independence, and when Gilbert got there, he also established a store in Independence in 1832. And that, too, was a storehouse for the church, where he would both sell goods out of the store, but then also provide the needs of the poor out of that storehouse. There were dozens of utopian movements and utopian societies that Joseph Smith and others would have been familiar with.
I think what separates the one from the Latter-day Saints, of course, is we believe it was given by God himself. That God revealed the principles for how he wanted his law to be lived. Those principles included giving all that we have, our time, talents, energies, everything we have to build God's kingdom on earth. And then one would receive back from a bishop a stewardship. You would become a steward, but under the Lord's law, everything belonged to God.
All was His. And we were simply stewards. And then we would give our own.
a report of our stewardships to a bishop annually. So it included agency. It included personal responsibility.
It included reporting of stewardships. It included an allowance or accounting for family circumstances, wants, and needs. It was heavily dependent on a three-way relationship between God and his apostles.
appointed priesthood leader and the person who was living consecration. So, revelation to the priesthood leader and revelation to the individual, and those three parties, the Lord, his priesthood leaders, and the participants would work out what was best for their situation. So, the Lord's system of consecration creates a balance governed through revelation for what would be best for everyone, given their circumstances, talents, strengths, abilities.
But ultimately, these these people lived as if everything belonged to God. And that certainly differs from later efforts of communism or socialism or other things. On an annual basis, you would meet with the bishop and you would decide what... Your what needed to be put back into the farm or whatever your stewardship was that was needed for the next year and what was left over what was the surplus and you would consecrate your surplus to the Bishop's storehouse for the poor and the needy. The way that these storehouses were funded was through an organization that was called the United Firm.
And today, the United Firm, what it is, how it functioned, a lot of people can be confused about that. And they're confused about it because the revelations that talk about the United Firm, section 78, 82, 104 of the Doctrine and Covenants, all had the language changed of what the United Firm was. And so instead of being called the United Firm in these revelations, it's called the United Order.
And then when Brigham Young sets up United Orders in Salt Lake and in Utah, we get these confused and we think, oh, well, this revelation is talking about United Order. That must be the same thing that Brigham Young set up. But it's not. It's really the United Firm.
And what the United Firm was, was a group of initially nine men, nine church leaders, The point of this firm is essentially to be kind of the business arm of the church, but not everyone's a part of it. There are church leaders that are made kind of the, you don't want to call it a board of directors, but they're made, they're united in this firm. They contribute some of their property to it. They ostensibly are all equal in property in it. And it's going to cover things like the purchase of church properties.
The running of things like the church's mill or the ashery, especially the mercantile stores, the Newell K. Whitney store, the Gilbert store in Missouri. The United Firm is set up, and these nine men are supposed to coordinate the operation of the church's storehouses and the church's printing office in Independence, and they're supposed to use the profits from each of these things to help fund the other. So when the Book of Commandments comes forward, They're hoping that they'll sell lots of copies of the Book of Commandments. The money that they gain from the sale of those books can then be used to purchase goods in the church's storehouses.
And likewise, since both of these storehouses are selling goods for profit, as well as providing them to the poor, whatever money they get back from that can be used to help fund the printing office. That's how this was supposed to be set up. And so the United Firm is established to provide that coordination, that cooperation.
So it's a very specific organization. And when you read section 78 and 82 and 104 in the Doctrine and Covenants, those revelations weren't given to the saints at large. They were given to those nine men who were going to be in the United Firm.
There are problems inside of the United Firm, and many of these are alluded to in the DNC. For instance, W. W. Phelps, who...
is no stranger to making himself more important than other people think he is. W.W. Phelps is going to come to start thinking of the literary enterprise in Jackson County as his own enterprise, right? Well, this is my press and this is my paper that I'm putting out.
He's publishing the Evening and Morning Star there. And in fact, in a letter he writes to Joseph, he's using those terminologies, you know, well, with my press and with my paper, I've done this and I've done that. And Joseph writes him back with a little bit of chiding, saying, this is not your press. This is not an I press. This is we.
This is ours. This is the church's. And it kind of demonstrates that one of the problems exists even in establishing stewardships.
The last kind of element to the law of consecration in 1831. to roughly, you know, 1835, is that church members not living in Missouri, although they're not necessarily asked to consecrate all of their property to the church, there are many church members who sell land, you know, they're living in New York, they sell land, and they provide that money to the Kirtland High Council to be used to purchase other land in independence for the buildup of the city of Zion. So you also have church members making individual donations. And again, it's not necessarily all that they have, but it's money that they donate to the church that's also used for the poor and for the purchase of land. And so there's kind of these three elements in the operation of the law of consecration in these early years. You have the saints in Zion donating money to Edward Partridge so that he can purchase lands.
You have the United Firm, this administrative body that's set up to regulate the church's storehouses and printing operations and trying to generate money through those that can be used for the poor and for the purchase of lands. And then you have other church members not living in Kirtland, not living in independence, that will donate money to the church that can be used for these same purposes as well. Line upon line, precept upon precept, the Lord reveals his doctrines. Along with consecration, the Lord would reveal tithing.
Today, the two are inextricably connected. In a way, the historical background on the tithing revelation starts with the Kirtland Temple because Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints were very anxious to complete the temple and receive the endowment of power from on high. And so with that sense of urgency, they went into debt to finish the construction of the temple. And by early 1838, when Joseph Smith moved from Kirtland, Ohio to far west Missouri, he was thousands of dollars in debt. In April of 1838, April 26th, Joseph Smith receives what is now Doctrine and Covenants section 115, which is the big revelation about the place of Far West.
It commands the Latter-day Saints to build up Far West as a holy city of Zion with a temple, and it directs them to begin construction on the temple on the 4th of July of that year. But it also says that Joseph Smith and other church leaders are not to go into debt to build the temple, as they had with the Kirtland Temple. So, as directed, the Latter-day Saints begin building the Far West Temple on the 4th of July, and they do so by laying the temple cornerstones.
But that's just the very beginning. How are they going to build this thing? Well, the next Sunday, July 8th, Joseph Smith receives the tithing revelation. And this is actually one of five revelations that Joseph Smith receives that day. All five have to do with church leadership and finance.
And all five are apparently received by Joseph Smith in the morning of July 8th in a meeting of church leaders. The tithing revelation that Joseph Smith received that day said that it was specifically to raise funds for building the temple. That was one of the reasons for the revelation given in the revelation. And the tithing revelation basically had two parts. The first part is that the Latter-day Saints were to consecrate all of their surplus property.
Now what is surplus property? That meant any property that could not be put to good use. So for example, if you had more land than you could farm, or more cows than you could milk, or anything like that, you were to give those to Bishop Partridge, Bishop Edward Partridge, the Bishop of Zion. Secondly, after having made this first consecration, the saints were to pay one-tenth of their interest annually.
Now what does that mean, one-tenth of their interest annually? Well, one-tenth, that's pretty easy, 10 percent. Annually, That's easy.
That's on a yearly basis. But what is meant by interest? Bishop Edward Partridge explained what was meant by interest.
Interest meant interest, like an interest rate on an investment. Now, at the very end of the tithing revelation, it said that it was not only for Zion, for those Latter-day Saints in Missouri, the land of Zion, but also an example for the stakes of Zion. So the math is pretty easy here. 60 out of 1,000 is.06 or 6%.
And in fact, 6% was the traditional interest rate in America. It actually came from England. When the New England colonies were formed, they just brought across that tradition and laws of a 6% interest rate, and that continued as the traditional rate in America. for many, many years. So you take an inventory of all of your assets and liabilities, and you add up all of your real and personal property, and then you subtract all of your debts, and you figure out what your net worth is.
Now, if you're going to be a good steward of your inheritance, then you're going to put your assets to work over the course of the next year, and you're basically going to be able to increase your worth by a certain amount. And an ordinary amount of increase in the United States at this time is 6%. And that's reflected in the 6% interest rate laws.
So going back to the tithing revelation, the understanding was that you would calculate your net worth. You would take 6% of that, which would be an amount that you should be able to increase the worth of it by in the course of a year. And you would take one-tenth of that.
So your tithing would be one-tenth of 6% of your net worth. So to clarify, we don't know exactly what the Lord intended when he gave this revelation to Joseph Smith. And we don't know exactly what Joseph Smith meant by the word interest when he used that word to give the revelation. But we do have this clear explanation from Bishop Edward Partridge, who was one of the men in the leadership meeting on the morning of 8 July 1838, which is apparently where the tithing revelation was received and delivered. And Bishop Partridge explains, that a family would calculate their net worth, then calculate 6% of that at the regular interest rate of return, as if you're investing your own stewardship for the next year, and then take one-tenth of that.
So your tithing would be one-tenth of 6% of the net worth of your household. So the Latter-day Saints were expelled from the state of Missouri. They took refuge in the state of Illinois, and they began building up the town of Nauvoo.
And Joseph Smith received a revelation, what's now Doctrine and Covenants section 124, and this is the big revelation about the place of Nauvoo. And it says that Nauvoo is to be built up as a city, as a stake of Zion, even a cornerstone of Zion. And they are to build a temple. In 1841, the Corbin of the Twelve Apostles writes an epistle to the church about raising money to build the Nauvoo Temple.
And they cite the tithing revelation from far west. The Twelve said, The temple is to be built by tithing and consecration, and everyone is at liberty to consecrate all they find in their hearts so to do. But the tithing required is one-tenth of all anyone possessed at the commencement of the building, and one-tenth part of all his increase from that time till the completion of the same. Instead of paying one-tenth of your interest, which earlier had been understood as 6%, the epistle from the 12 says, to pay one-tenth annually on your increase.
So here interest is interpreted as increase, meaning what you earn or gain during the year, rather than a percentage of your net worth. Two days later, Joseph Smith wrote a notice telling the Latter-day Saints that he had appointed Willard Richards, one of the 12 apostles who had signed the tithing epistles, as temple recorder. to receive donations for the temple. And this shows that Joseph Smith was aware of the plan that the 12 apostles had written in their epistle to use the tithing revelation to raise money to build the temple. And it apparently shows that Joseph Smith agrees with their understanding of interest in the revelation.
Because Joseph Smith does not correct The way they said money should be raised for the temple, he merely appoints one of them to receive the tithings. It was January 1845 when the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles further solidified that interest meant income. They said, We would remind the brethren of their duty in tithing according to the laws and commandments given through Joseph Smith the prophet. It is the duty of all saints to tithe themselves one-tenth of all they possess when they enter into the new and everlasting covenant, and then one-tenth of their interest or income yearly afterwards.
The tithing revelation received in Far West in 1838, which said that it would be a law for the church eternally, is the standard system of church revenue throughout church history. That question comes up every semester, and we discuss that in class. I love President Hinckley.
President Hinckley said, the law of consecration has not been done away with and is still in effect. And so I try to help my students see that, though we don't live consecration in the same manner in which they lived it, physically deeding a property to... to a priesthood leader and receiving back from that priesthood leader a stewardship based on my family circumstances, wants, and needs, I still live consecration.
I still live its principles. I think the overarching principle, as J. Urban Clark once taught, is that the core principle of consecration is that all things belong to God.
He says repeatedly, this is the center of the law of consecration. So learning to view everything I have, my time, my energies, my strengths, my abilities, my talents, my property, my possessions, as if they're God's, to be used in furthering his work to bless his children on earth. I think those are the principles of consecration. So when a student says to me, well, why did it fail? fail.
I think it failed in part because not everyone was living those principles. Latter-day Saints who go to the temple and receive their endowments make a covenant to live the law of consecration. And in a way, there's nothing holding us back from living the law of consecration. And in fact, there are many Latter-day Saints who, mostly elderly Latter-day Saints, who they've paid off their mortgage, they've paid off all of their other debts, and their net worth is positive.
And maybe they're even retired. And so they're living off of their retirement and the things that they've earned in their lifetimes. And what are they doing with that money? They're going on missions, service missions, proselytizing missions, church service. They're using that money to bless their families.
They're donating to the church for fast offerings and all kinds of other things, temple funds, missionary funds, perpetual education fund. They're traveling to visit family. They're helping grandchildren with college money.
I know lots of Latter-day Saints who are living this kind of life, which is a life of consecration. I think it's wrong to assume that consecration was removed, tithing has replaced it, and if or when we are faithful enough, we'll get consecration back, like President Hinckley said. The law of consecration was not done away with. It's still in effect.
And so I try to help my students see consecration wasn't an experiment. It certainly wasn't an economic experiment. It was a law. It is a law. And God, who doesn't change, hasn't changed that law.