No Single Prophet, No Added Scripture

The Church of Christ (Temple Lot) departs from both of the larger Latter Day Saint successor bodies in a doctrinal choice that is fundamental to its identity: it rejects the office of a single ongoing prophet or church president entirely, governing itself instead through a Quorum of Twelve Apostles who share leadership collectively, on the reasoning that no one individual should hold the kind of singular revelatory authority Joseph Smith once held. The church also declines to accept the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, two collections of additional scripture that later Latter Day Saint bodies added to their canon, restricting its own accepted scripture to the Bible and the Book of Mormon as originally published, and it explicitly rejects doctrines that developed later within the wider movement, including baptism performed on behalf of the deceased and the doctrine of celestial, or eternal, marriage. This combination, minimal leadership structure, a deliberately narrower scripture, and rejection of several later doctrinal developments, makes the Temple Lot church one of the most doctrinally conservative branches to emerge from the nineteenth century succession crisis, even as it continues to affirm the same 1831 prophecy about its own small parcel of land that all the competing branches trace back to.