There are a lot of churches in Independence. The Community of Christ is
headquartered here. Their new temple is designed to look like a seashell.
While it does in this picture I took, when you’re actually near it, it hardly
resembles a seashell. I do like how shiny it is, though. Very pretty. Unfortunately,
we didn’t have time to go inside. They were doing some construction inside
though, so I wouldn’t have been able to get a picture from the bottom of
the spiral.
Independence is the hometown of Harry Truman. His home looked really nice—though
we just passed by it—and the people of Independence seem quite proud of
Truman. His library is located here, not too far from the LDS visitor’s
center or the Community of Christ temple (which is across the street from
the visitor’s center).
Sadly, we didn’t spend much time at all in Independence. We watched a movie
in the visitor’s center that I’d already seen before. I got a bit antsy
watching it. It’s a very good movie, but my posterior had done enough sitting
for a lifetime, it felt like, and the chairs weren’t exactly a cushy couch.
After watching the movie, we wandered around the place for a bit. They have
an original copy of the Book of Mormon on display. My favorite place was
the statue of Christ, though. The mural behind the statue is lovely. They
also had a display with one of the original copies of the Book of Mormon
(to the right).
After moseying around there for a bit, we went out to examine the temple
lot. The Lord revealed that there was to be a temple in Jackson County,
Missouri near the courthouse in Independence. Unfortunately, persecution
forced the Saints out of the area before much more than the cornerstones
were put in place. The temple lot is now no longer owned by the Church—a
split-off group called the “Church of Christ” now came back and claimed
the land as their own. They did a bit of digging around and found the cornerstones.
You can’t really tell by this picture, but it was going to be a massive
temple. It took us about fifteen minutes to figure out where all four corners were going to be.
In the picture, you can see the Community of Christ auditorium. This was their headquarters until they built the
nifty shell-shaped temple.
The temple is owned by one of the splinter groups from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A lot of people had different ideas as to how the Church should be run after Joseph and Hyrum were martyred. You can learn more about some of them on Wikipedia.
"Sorry...I just thought with the captain issue in question, I'd throw
in my name for consideration."
Pintel