Lucy Mack Smith - Church Leadership

Church Leadership

When converts were baptized into the new church, Lucy expanded her motherly concern to include them as well. En route to Kirtland, Ohio, when the women in the group—and even the men—behaved like improvident, sulky children, Lucy used a combination of parental firmness and encouragement, took over the charge of feeding those who had come without supplies, disciplined and watched over the children of the negligent, and found housing for them as well. During a moment of grumbling, she reminded them, "Have any of you lacked? Have not I set food before you every day, and made you, who had not provided for yourselves, as welcome as my own children?" (chap. 39). It was a telling comparison, outlining as it did the role she played in the church at a time when the institution provided nothing similar. In Kirtland, Lucy shared her home with newly arrived immigrants, sometimes sleeping on the floor herself when the house was full. She also continued in her missionary work, even daring to stand up to a Presbyterian minister in defense of her faith.

When Joseph Jr. made his father the church's first patriarch in December 1833, he emphasized the familial nature of the early Mormon movement. Likening his father to Adam, Smith Jr. said, "So shall it be with my father; he shall be called a prince over his posterity, holding the keys of the patriarchal priesthood over the kingdom of God on earth, even the Church of the Latter Day Saints" (qtd. in Bates and Smith, 34). In this calling Father Smith was to give patriarchal blessings to the Saints; and when he attended the blessing meetings, he insisted that Lucy accompany him (chap. 44). On at least one occasion, Lucy added her blessing or confirmed what had already been received (Crosby).

During the Missouri period when Joseph Jr. and Hyrum were imprisoned in Liberty Jail, Lucy was a tower of strength to her husband and other church members. Only in Nauvoo, Illinois, with floods of converts rising like a tide over the New York stalwarts who were left and with Lucy largely isolated in caring for her dying husband did her sense of her role falter. She still felt like a mother but was less often recognized as such by her "children" in the church. Perhaps the most important meaning in Joseph Sr.'s dying blessing on Lucy was to reaffirm her role and status: "Mother, do you not know that you are the mother of as great a family as ever lived upon the earth. . . . They are raised up to do the Lord's work" (chap. 52). He was telling her that her influence, focused on her biological children, was the seedbed for a larger spiritual family.