051916

Day 2 of our trip to Adam-Ondi-Ahman started out by leaving the hotel relatively early to get a jump on traffic and see some of the sites before we made the Kansas City Temple 12:30 session.

Our tour bus is in the alcove in the middle as we're loading up to leave.  

The first stop was in Independence, Missouri at the temple site.  This is the sign just outside the temple plot.  It is owned by the "Temple Plot" church.  They are called the Church of Christ (Hedrickites).  They are an offshoot of Joseph Smith from 1830 with about 200 members that meet in the church just behind this picture.  

This is the actual temple site.  It is just a grassy field with 4 markers denoting the 4 corners.

North West Corner of the temple plot.  There are 3 more in each corner of the temple plot.  I didn't get a chance to get to the other markers.

We all gathered in the center of the temple plot to learn about the temples that will one day be built here, this spot being the main temple.  Joseph drew up a plot for all of the temples and the surrounding area back in 1830 or so.

We then walked over to a couple of buildings and the "Stone Church".

This explains the origins of the building.  Joseph Smith III,  Joseph Smith's surviving son from Emma Smith, was the first president of the church, presided here and built this church.

No matter what they call their church, they can't get away from their original name so long ago.  Now called the Community of Christ.

This is the Church of Christ (Hedrickites) church.  Limited number of members.

We then walked over to the Community of Christ's Temple for a visit.  It is across the street from the temple plot and in the vicinity of everything else in Independence.

Erected in 1994, in discussions with the C of C tour guides in Nauvoo, a tour guide in Nauvoo made it very plain that their temple is open to everyone and ours are closed.  Well, they don't do much of anything in their temple, unlike our temples, where we do a lot of work for our ancestors and living members.  The C of C has daily prayer vigils for peace at 1 PM and special sessions occasionally.  Other than that, it is vacant the vast majority of the time.

We were allowed into the sanctuary where they explained you can come in and pray or have meetings.  There are several pictures around the upper walls depicting ordinances that are performed in the church including baptism, confirmation, blessings, ordinations, healings, special blessing of comfort, etc. 

In the hallway leading up to the main room there were several pieces of artwork.  This particular piece was entitled "The Tree of Life".  There was a lot of emphasis on artwork in the building.  Most of it had a religious emphasis.  None of it related to any of their beginnings with Joseph Smith.

This is the stand and organ view.  Note that the organ player has his/her back to the audience.

Looking up from that spot you can see it resembles a conch shell clearly in design.

From the center of the room it looks like this.

A view around the room.

Looking back towards the exit, the room looks like this.  There are about 1,500 seats in the main area.

They give annual awards for peace and recognize those that contribute to it.  Here are those awards for the last several years.  The church's emphasis is on world peace, hence, the daily prayer for peace at 1 PM.

Oddly enough, there was no mention of Joseph Smith in any of the tour guides presentation remarks.  The last part of the tour was through their museum, where we are not allowed to take any pictures whatsoever, which I do not understand.  That is typical of any/all of their sites.  The museum had lots of stuff displayed about Joseph Smith and there the guide finally mentioned Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon with some other historical facts.  He did mention that he uses the BoM only as a reference in the study of the scriptures.  It's not a large part of study.  They had pictures of their apostles including two women that have been ordained to that position.  Bro Dunn also said he has talked to a sister in one of his tours that has been ordained to the office of High Priest in their church.  Apparently, they have a different direction from their leaders on priesthood ordinations than we do.  The president of their church refers to himself as "Wally".  They have about 250,000 members currently, worldwide.

Next we went across the street to the LDS Church Visitor's Center.

A much different atmosphere is in the visitor's center.  We viewed a film about families and discussed the meaning of life's journey in the first part of the visit.  We had a very nice young sister missionary giving us the tour and she bore her testimony of the gospel.

Of course, we had to pose for this picture after the sisters sang to us.

Next stop was the Kansas City temple for a session.  It is a beautiful temple.  Unfortunately, I can no longer enjoy the temple as I'm looking at the lights, the way they hang curtains, the types of lights in the ceiling fixtures, the lockers, how hard it would be to change a ballast, the way they do lockers for the ordinance workers...  Forever ruined for me, I guess...

It was dedicated in 2012 so it is a fairly new temple.

...and the picture in front of the fountain.  The brother taking the picture took a bunch of pictures but this was the only one that showed up on the camera so, this is it.

At any rate, we left for home after this and a long ride to Nauvoo.  We had a great time, saw some wonderful sites of our church's history, and enjoyed Bro Dunn's efforts to fill in the blanks.  So glad we went.