Experience With The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
The Pulsipher family was introduced to the Latter Day Saint church while living in Onondaga County, New York, and Zera was baptized on 11 January 1832 by missionary Jared Carter. For the next two years he presided over the branch of the church in that county and served a number of missions to preach his new-found faith. During one of these missions he taught and baptized Wilford Woodruff. The Pulsiphers joined the bulk of the Saints in Kirtland, Ohio in 1835 where Zera was ordained as a First President of the Seventy by Joseph Smith, Jr. on 6 March 1838. After the highest leadership of the Church fled Kirtland in 1838, the remaining First Presidents of the Seventy (including Zera Pulsipher) organized the bulk of the remaining faithful adherents to travel to Far West, Missouri—the new Church headquarters. This group of over 500 Saints was known as the Kirtland Camp and was one of the earliest concerted efforts of mass Mormon migration.
Zera and his family followed the main body of the Church membership as they settled in Far West, Nauvoo, Winter Quarters, and Salt Lake City. He also helped settle Southern Utah in his later years. In each of these areas, Zera provided leadership including helping to locate the settlement of Garden Grove, Iowa; leading a company of 100 to Utah; serving as a city counselor in Salt Lake City for a number of years; and presiding over the settlement of Hebron, Utah 1863-1869.
Pulsipher abused the sealing authority by performing unauthorized marriages—most likely of a polygamous nature—and as a result was dropped from the presidency of the Seventy and was either excommunicated or disfellowshipped for a very brief period in the spring of 1862. He was brought before the First Presidency on 12 April 1862 and was rebaptized and ordained a high priest afterwards. Later on, he was ordained a patriarch. Zera died in Hebron, Utah in early 1872 as a member in full fellowship in the Church.
Read more about this topic: Zera Pulsipher
Famous quotes containing the words experience, church, jesus, christ and/or saints:
“I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false statement I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The street is as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 1:10.
“He weren’t no saint—but at Jedgment
I’d run my chance with Jim,
‘Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it, thar an’ then:
And Christ ain’t a-goin’ to be too hard
On a man that died for me.”
—John Milton Hay (1838–1905)
“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.”
—Bible: New Testament, Ephesians 2:19-22.