Church base
fit from the bathing and fresh air – the resort’s therapeutic effects. The esteemed gentlemen held a meeting and met ‘a sister’ (a convert) who was not expected to live, but through faith she was indeed healed and the next day she walked two miles with them.
Chapter eight of Kimball’s official journal records these events:
‘On visiting Southport, a celebrated bathing place, and a great resort for rich people in search of health, there I beheld halt and blind, deaf and maimed and leprous. Such a distressed set of beings I never saw before. At this place there was a sister sick, and not expected to live. She was healed by administering the ordinances, and the next day she went with us two miles on foot.’
We didn’t know North Meols had suffered with leprosy!
This was followed up by his colleague Brigham Young who, just four years earlier, had become only the second Prophet of the Church, and who accompanied Heber Kimball back to Southport five months later, on October 29, 1840, and they preached in Churchtown where a meeting was held and four people were baptised. The number of members in Southport quickly soon rose to 20 – you could say it was the beginning of ‘Southport’s road to Zion’ (a possible title for our manuscript on this topic).
Charles Hesketh had not long begun (May 1836) his 40-year reign as the Rector of North Meols, so we may wonder what his thoughts were on these faith healers. We are not aware of anyone ever suffering from leprosy in North Meols or Southport but, you never know.
However, this time was pivotal in the history of the Mormon Church, and the importance of the quorum of twelve apostles, these early English Latter-day Saints, cannot be exaggerated.
By 1870, roughly half of the Utah population were British immigrants, and it was said that the spiritual power that emanated from that was absolutely essential at that juncture of the Church, and enormously significant.
It is quite possible that without the influx of British converts the Mormon Church would not have survived the period of intense persecution it encountered during the 1840s. Interestingly, with the remarkable acceptance of the teachings of the Church by the people of this country, particularly in Lancashire, the Mormon Church could very easily have become a distinctly British church, with its HQ not in Salt Lake, but Preston, Lancashire. Even today the oldest continuous branch of the Church is in Preston – the first location of the preaching of the Mormon faith east of the Atlantic.
The work of those first missionaries in England had a ripple effect that forever changed the Church, and by 1900, more than 100,000 English converts had emigrated from Britain to join the Church members in America.
Although the Latter Day Saints Church took root in Preston – when its first missionaries arrived in 1837, resulting in the Preston Ward becoming the world’s longest continuously functioning unit in the LDS Church the Mormon temple was not constructed in the heart of Lancashire until 1998.
With the increasing British membership of the Church, it was perhaps not surprising that the Mormon temple – one of only 60 in the world at that time, and only the second in Great Britain – was erected in the vicinity of the Church’s English roots. The construction is certainly a fitting tribute to the zeal of those early missionaries, the majestic fruit of whose labours preserved the life-blood of the Mormon Church.
As David Pickup says in his book The Pick & Flower of England, the Mormons’ story is not just the story of the success of a new religion, but a fascinating insight into a neglected aspect of the social history of Victorian Lancashire.
So, now we have the very impressive structure – the largest temple in Europe – in full view of the M61 motorway on the northern outskirts of Chorley, a few miles from Preston, and less than 20 miles from Southport. The temple’s groundbreaking ceremony took place on June 12, 1994, when construction began in earnest.
Four years later the cornerstone was laid and the temple dedicated in June 1998, featuring four Sealing Rooms and four Ordinance Rooms within the near 70,000 square foot temple, clad in Sardinian Olympia
White granite. It was officially opened with a two-week ‘public open house’ which attracted 123,000 visitors. Topping the 155ft high spire is a goldleafed figure of the Angel Moroni.
This very impressive structure is the largest Mormon temple outside Salt Lake City, and looks as if it has been lifted out of Utah and dropped in the middle of Lancashire by a giant helicopter.
Next week we will look at the how the Southport church came about, and after that witness some of the harrowing stories of the faithful ‘Saints’ from Southport who trekked across to Utah with their handcarts to start a new life.
You could say these immigrants – from the 1840s to the 1870s (and the Scandinavian Saints who joined them), who sailed the high seas and trekked across the plains – probably saved the early LDS Church, certainly numerically.