A Denomination That Renamed Itself Chose a Harvest, Not a Founder

Independence Temple was dedicated in 1994 under the name Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a denomination whose nineteenth century founding story runs directly through Joseph Smith. A visitor arriving expecting the temple's signature artwork to picture that founder, or a scene from the church's own founding, finds instead fifty feet of stained glass showing rice and wheat.

That choice was not an oversight. The denomination that built the Independence Temple was already moving toward the identity it would formally adopt in 2001, when it renamed itself Community of Christ specifically to foreground its ongoing Christian mission over its founding narrative. A monumental window depicting an agricultural harvest, illustrating a New Testament verse about fields ready for harvesting, fits that reorientation exactly. It commissions art that points a visitor toward the denomination's stated mission of worldwide justice and peace rather than toward the biography of the person who began it.

Other elements of the temple make the same choice in different materials, among them etched glass trees near the entrance representing the Sacred Grove where Joseph Smith is said to have had his first vision, so the founding story has not been erased from the building entirely. But the fifty foot window given pride of place at the west entrance, the piece a visitor meets first and cannot avoid, is the harvest image, not the founder. A building can only put one thing at its most prominent point, and Community of Christ chose its ongoing mission over its own origin story.