Prophet-President of Community of Christ

The Prophet-President leads Community of Christ, known until 2001 as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a denomination that traces its founding to the Latter Day Saint movement of Joseph Smith but rejected the leadership of Brigham Young after Smith's 1844 death. Rather than follow Young's westward migration to Utah, a substantial body of Latter Day Saints in the American Midwest reorganized in 1860 around Joseph Smith III, the founder's eldest surviving son, who had declined to join any of the rival successor movements as a young man and was invited to lead the reorganized body once he reached adulthood.

This choice set the Reorganization on a markedly different path from the Utah church: it rejected plural marriage, which the Utah church had publicly practiced for decades, and it developed a theology and worship style that grew closer to mainstream Protestantism over the twentieth century. The 2001 name change to Community of Christ reflected this trajectory, signaling a church that had moved away from some distinctive nineteenth-century Latter Day Saint doctrines while retaining the Book of Mormon as scripture alongside the Bible.

Headquartered in Independence, Missouri, a site significant in early Latter Day Saint history as a location Joseph Smith identified for a future temple, the church today emphasizes peace and justice ministries alongside its traditional sacraments.

For more than a century, leadership of the Reorganized Church passed within the family of founder Joseph Smith: Joseph Smith III led from 1860 to 1914, followed by his sons Frederick M. Smith and Israel A. Smith, and then his grandson W. Wallace Smith, whose tenure ran into the 1970s. This hereditary pattern, while never doctrinally mandated as an absolute rule, gave the young reorganization a continuity of leadership that helped distinguish it from the larger Utah church in its members' eyes.

The pattern ended in 1996, when Wallace B. Smith, the last family member to serve, was succeeded by W. Grant McMurray, the first Prophet-President chosen from outside the founding family. Since then the office has been filled through a process the church describes as discernment, in which the sitting Prophet-President and church leadership identify a successor, who is then presented to and sustained by the church's World Conference, its representative governing body.

The shift away from a hereditary line accompanied Community of Christ's broader modernization, including the ordination of women to its priesthood beginning in 1984, a step that further separated its trajectory from other branches of the Latter Day Saint movement and underscored that its authority structures, unlike the apostolic seniority system used by the Utah-based church, had never been fixed by an unalterable rule.