Morrisite Glossary: Churches, Places, Offices and Titles

Rogers, Eric Paul

Glossary

Names and terms

The names of the churches, places, offices and titles that readers meet across this guide, in brief. Each entry links to where the guide says more.

Church of the Firstborn: The name by which Joseph Morris’s church, organized on April 6, 1861, at South Weber, Utah, is now usually known; its members are usually called Morrisites. It was not the church’s first name. Morris’s revelations call it simply “my Church,” and the revelation on baptism of April 3, 1861, speaks of members of “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, under the fullness of the gospel” (The Spirit Prevails, No. 55, p. 78). Anderson, following Richard W. Young (1890), gives the name at the organization as the Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Most High, and says it “later on” became known as the Church of the Firstborn. The Prophet Cainan declared that the church would “also be called The Church of the Firstborn,” and the Doves’ California congregation used the name from the 1870s (Anderson, Revisited, pp. 57, 66, 182). See more
Morrisites: Followers of Joseph Morris, and members of the churches that descended from his church. In South Weber the word lingered long enough to be used as a schoolyard taunt. See more
Kington Fort (Kingston Fort): The abandoned 1853 settlers’ fort at South Weber where Morris gathered his followers in 1861–62, and where the posse besieged them in June 1862. It was named for Bishop Thomas Kington; “Kington” is the correct spelling, but many accounts write “Kingston.” Search under both. See more
Morrisite War: The common name for the siege of Kington Fort, June 13–15, 1862, by a territorial posse led by the deputy marshal Robert T. Burton, which ended in the deaths of Joseph Morris and others and the arrest of the men in the fort. See more
Roll of membership: The list of 430 people baptized into Morris’s church in 1861–62, printed in San Francisco by George S. Dove & Co. in 1886. Its compiler wrote that many baptized were never recorded. Pencil notes in one copy mark officers; they are not part of the printed roll. See more
The Spirit Prevails: Morris’s revelations, articles and letters, published by George S. Dove & Co. in 1886. For his followers it was scripture. See more
First Council: A council of Morris’s church. Forscutt, who was its clerk, names among its members John Parson, John and Richard Cook, and himself. Pencil notes in one copy of the roll mark John Banks and Richard Cook as of the presidency. See more
Apostle: An office in Morris’s church. The pencil notes in one copy of the roll mark fourteen men as apostles, among them James Dove, John R. Eardley, Mark H. Forscutt, John E. Jones and R. J. Livingstone. See more
Morristown: The Morrisite settlement at Soda Springs, Idaho, founded in May 1863 under the protection of Patrick Edward Connor; its “Lower Town” stood below the soldiers’ Camp Connor. Most of it now lies under Alexander Reservoir. See more
Prophet Cainan: George Williams, who claimed to be Morris’s successor and led the church that regathered in the Deer Lodge Valley, Montana, in the 1870s. In 1879 he prophesied that Deer Lodge County would be the site of the Second Coming. He died in 1882. See more
Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Most High: According to Anderson, following Richard W. Young (1890), the name Morris’s church took at its organization on April 6, 1861 (Revisited, p. 66; see Church of the Firstborn). It was the name of the Montana church, used by its council by 1873 and kept after Williams’s death in 1882, when it was led in turn by William James, George Thompson, Andrew Hendrikson and George Johnson. It formally disbanded in 1969. See more
Lord’s House: The Montana Morrisites’ wood-frame church near Racetrack, begun in 1877, named for the panel over its doors. It is the only Morrisite church building known to survive. See more
Kingdom of Heaven: The community William W. Davies led near Walla Walla, Washington, from 1867 to 1881, also called “the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth”; its members called themselves Christians of the Millennial Era. Many of them were San Francisco and Portland converts who had never been Morrisites. See more
Standard of Israel (S.I.): Davies’s title for himself, which he signed after his name. He also signed letters “Father.” See more
Millennial Era (M.E.): Davies’s reckoning of years from January 24, 1866, when, he taught, the presence of God descended upon him. His papers are dated both ways, as “1876 & 11.” See more
The vow: The covenant a member of Davies’s community made on joining, administered by Davies or his missionaries. Members gave their labor and property to the common fund. See more
Seventh Angel: A title Joseph Morris claimed, after the angel who sounds the last trumpet in Revelation. For Morris it marked a stage in the soul’s ascent through the angelic ranks. The phrase was already in Latter-day Saint use: Doctrine and Covenants 88:112 names “Michael, the seventh angel, even the archangel,” and in 1844 W. W. Phelps’s funeral sermon for Joseph Smith alluded to him as the seventh angel who pours out the last vial of wrath (Revelation 16). James Brighouse later used it for the title of his tracts. See more
Reincarnation: The teaching that spirits return to the earth in new bodies. Morris dated it to a revelation of 1859; Forscutt called it Morris’s “strange theory of repeated embodiment.” Davies’s community taught it too. See more
Reorganized Church (RLDS): The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now Community of Christ, which Forscutt and other former Morrisites joined in the 1860s and later. See more
“Probable”: On this site, a mark that an identification is likely but not proven: a FamilySearch match, or a person in the sources who may or may not be the one on the roll. See more

Cite this page: Rogers, Eric Paul, ed. “Glossary.” Morrisite.org. https://morrisite.org/glossary.html. Add the date you consulted it.