Church of Christ (Temple Lot)

In 1831, only fifteen months after organizing the church that became the Latter Day Saint movement, Joseph Smith identified a specific parcel of land in Independence, Missouri, as the future site of a temple marking the movement's prophesied gathering place, and he and Sidney Rigdon formally dedicated the site that August. The Latter Day Saints were driven out of Missouri only a few years later, and the land itself passed through other hands for decades before a former Latter Day Saint named Granville Hedrick, who had chosen not to follow the main body of the church west to Utah, organized a separate congregation and returned to Independence, purchasing the original temple lot in 1867. That congregation, informally called the Hedrickites and formally the Church of Christ, still holds and maintains the small, largely undeveloped 2.5 acre parcel today, treating it as the genuine site named in Joseph Smith's original 1831 revelation, even though no temple has ever been built there. Two much larger Latter Day Saint successor bodies, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Community of Christ, both maintain their own buildings on adjoining portions of the same historic site, making the Temple Lot a rare place where competing branches of one religious movement coexist as neighbors.

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.