This page indexes the church’s governing offices as they developed between 1829 and 1834, and how the 1833 Plat assigned them to specific buildings and seats.
The Church of Christ began in 1829 without a tiered hierarchy: a body of elders and disciples, bound together mainly by what they had witnessed rather than by any standing office. See Formation & Reorganization for that founding period and the April 1830 incorporation that followed it. What this page traces is what happened next — how, over the following four years, that flat structure grew a bishop, a high priesthood, a standing presidency, a high council, and finally a detailed architectural home for all of it, before the whole system was carried forward under a new name in May 1834.
1831 — Kirtland: Bishop and High Priest
Two new offices entered the church’s vocabulary in 1831, neither present in the 1829 founding documents. Edward Partridge was called and appointed the church’s first bishop, tasked under the Law of February 1831 with receiving consecrated properties and appointing each member a stewardship. At a June 1831 conference in Kirtland, several men were ordained to the newly introduced office of High Priest — a rank between elder and the church’s presidency that appears in neither the 1829 Articles nor the Book of Mormon’s own account of church government.
1832 — The First Presidency
On March 8, 1832, a three-man presidency was organized: Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon as counselor, and Jesse Gause. It was an unusual step for a movement that still numbered only a few hundred members, and the arrangement did not hold long — Gause was excommunicated by December 1832 after growing openly critical of the church, and Frederick G. Williams was called to the presidency in his place the following March, a little over two months before he would be shown the vision behind the Kirtland Temple’s design.
1833 — The Plat’s Twenty-Four Offices
The Plat of the City of Zion, recorded that May and June, gave the church’s growing roster of offices a physical plan. At the center of the plat sit three fifteen-acre blocks: two holding twelve public buildings each, one a bishop’s storehouse — twenty-four public buildings in total. Each of the twenty-four was individually named on the back of the plat by revelation, recorded by Frederick G. Williams that same May, assigning rows of buildings to the Melchizedek presidency, the Aaronic presidency, the elders, the high priests, the priests, the teachers, and the deacons in turn.
Two of the twenty-four — labeled #5 and #17 on the manuscript — were commanded to be built first. Companion revelations (see The House) gave each of these two buildings two identical courts, one above the other, with 480 identical seats per court, distributed among the offices then in existence:
| Office / body | Seats per court | Total across 4 courts |
|---|---|---|
| Deacons | 12 | 48 |
| Teachers | 24 | 96 |
| Priests | 48 | 192 |
| High priests | 72 | 288 |
| Elders | 288 | 1,152 |
| High council | 12 | 48 |
| Melchizedek presidencies (elder, high priest, bishop) | 12 | 48 |
| Aaronic presidencies (deacon, teacher, priest) | 12 | 48 |
| Total | 480 | 1,920 |
Later independent analysis reconstructs this seat table from the plat and building revelations read together; the plat’s own text does not print it as a single table. This site treats the reconstruction as analysis rather than something the 1833 record states outright — see the same caution on The Plat.
Building #5 became the Kirtland Temple. Building #17 was never built: the early Saints ran out of funds before construction could begin, leaving the church without enough completed buildings to seat and office the full 1,920 presidents the design called for.
1834 — The High Council
The last governing body to be organized before the church’s name change was the high council. On February 17, 1834, the church’s first stake was created in Kirtland with Joseph Smith as president, and a high council was organized the same day — a body intended to settle disputes that the church or a bishop’s council could not resolve to the parties’ satisfaction. A comparable council was organized in Missouri that July. By this point, five years after the twelve witnesses of 1829, the church’s governing ladder ran from deacon and teacher up through priest, elder, high priest, bishop, and a standing presidency, with a high council to arbitrate among them — the full structure the 1833 Plat had already built seats for.
Sources: Joseph Smith Papers, minutes and revelations cited on the Chronology, the-Law, The Plat, and The House pages. This page indexes offices across those primary sources rather than reproducing them at length.