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Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host John Delin and we're in the middle of a three-part series on Mormon Stories.

The first two hours of this series were spent with the wonderful John Hamer who is a former member of the LDS Church, a current member of the community of Christ.

And we talked quite extensively about his journey sort of, well, his appreciation for the Church as a youth and as an adolescent but his decision to leave the Church and what brought him back into Mormonism as a culture and ultimately what led him back into a position of what I would call faith and into his decision to actually join or affiliate with the Church.

Or affiliate with the community of Christ, which is was formerly named the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was sort of a competing branch of the restoration that came out of Joseph Smith's martyrdom.

And the community of Christ is a fascinating Church and I started following them a few years ago when I met Bill Russell and I even released one of his interviews or speeches on the podcast but the community of Christ is fascinating for a multiple set of reasons.

Not only is it sort of impossible to be a member of the LDS Church without really, well, it's impossible to fully appreciate LDS Church history without understanding, I believe, the community of Christ's history because I believe they're interwoven and we'll probably see that today.

But I also believe that the community of Christ is just this inspirational example of not only staying true to many of Joseph Smith's fundamental teachings about ongoing revelation and an open canon and many other types of things that we'll talk about.

But also it feels to me as though the reorganized Church sort of encountered and stared head on many of the intellectual and cultural issues in the 60s and 70s that the LDS Church is only getting around to facing, you know, in the 2000 teens.

And, you know, the community of Christ is still making positive changes recently, even as recently as the past couple of years.

And in many ways, I guess if we as LDS Church members want to see our future or learn about how we might optimally navigate our future, we have a lot to learn from the community of Christ.

So for all those reasons for the next hour or two, we are going to have this amazing presentation by John Hammer.

It's on YouTube. So those of you who are just listening through audio, you're going to miss out on the full experience if you don't watch the YouTube version because John Hammer is a gifted map maker and a gifted graphic designer.

And every one of these historical points that we're going to cover is going to help is going to have visual aids that really help us understand the history of the community of Christ and in many ways the history of the LDS Church.

And so we're going to cover that for the next hour or two and then we're going to conclude with a discussion about where the community of Christ is now.

They have an exciting new program to reach out to people who no longer feel like they can maintain affiliation with the LDS Church.

And personally, I'm just a fan of faith. I'm a fan of religious affiliation when it works for people.

And so I want to make sure people know about it because it's very relevant and I think it means to do really good things and I would love to see it succeed.

So with all of that, John Hammer, welcome back to Mormon Stories.

Thanks, John. That was a great, great introduction and hopefully I think, you know, when I've done a lot of the different study of the different smaller

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