Name Change, 1834

At a conference of elders in Kirtland, Ohio, on May 3, 1834, Sidney Rigdon proposed changing the name of the church from Church of Christ to “The Church of the Latter Day Saints.” Newel K. Whitney seconded the motion, Joseph Smith presided as moderator, and the vote passed unanimously. The new name omitted the word “Christ” entirely. This site’s own documentary record ends at that vote — but the vote did not arrive out of a quiet year. By May 3, Kirtland had already organized its first standing high council and spent ten weeks recruiting and assembling an armed relief expedition bound for the Saints expelled from Missouri the previous November. Both threads run through this page before the naming vote itself.

February: A Council, and a Call to Arms

Word of the November 1833 expulsion from Jackson County reached Kirtland only gradually, and by February 1834 church leaders there were still working out both how to govern the growing church and how to respond to the crisis in Missouri. On February 12, Joseph Smith met with a council of high priests and elders at his own home, expressing concern that church councils to that point had lacked the discipline of what he called “the ancient order.” Five days later, on February 17, that concern produced the church’s first standing high council, organized at Kirtland and later recorded as Section 102 — a body with far broader jurisdiction than the local stake high councils that would eventually succeed it, since in 1834 there was, as yet, only the one.

The new council did not sit idle. On February 22, Lyman Wight and Parley P. Pratt arrived in Kirtland from Clay County, Missouri as delegates from the exiled Saints, and two days later, on February 24, they met with Joseph Smith and the newly formed high council. Before or during that meeting — the record does not specify which — Joseph Smith received the revelation recorded as Section 103, authorizing the gathering of an armed relief expedition to Missouri. At the same meeting, Joseph Smith volunteered to lead the expedition himself; thirty or forty men present volunteered on the spot; and the council appointed him “Commander in Chief of the Armies of Israel.”

March – April: Recruiting the Camp

Over the following weeks, eight men fanned out from Kirtland to recruit volunteers and raise funds: Parley Pratt, Orson Pratt, and Orson Hyde departed almost immediately; Lyman Wight and Sidney Rigdon left Kirtland together on February 28; and Hyrum Smith and Frederick G. Williams followed, reported preaching in western New York by mid-March. Their combined efforts assembled a company of roughly two hundred men — with wagons, provisions, and arms for a march of a thousand miles — that came to be called the Camp of Israel, and later, Zion’s Camp. By early May the camp was substantially assembled at Kirtland, ready to march, under Joseph Smith’s personal command, to the aid of the Saints still displaced in Clay County.

May 3: The Naming Vote

It was into this same charged, mobilizing spring — a new high council barely two months old, and an armed expedition about to depart — that the church’s regular conference of elders convened at Kirtland on May 3 and took up, among its other business, a question that had nothing directly to do with either the council or the camp: what the church should be called.

The Two Problems the Name Was Meant to Solve

Organized in 1830 as the Church of Christ, the movement had operated for four years under a name that created two distinct, ongoing friction points on the Ohio and Missouri frontier.

The name adopted in 1834 addressed both problems directly: “Latter Day Saints” was distinctive enough to avoid confusion with Campbell’s movement, and specific enough to displace “Mormonite” as the church’s primary public label, at least among its own members.

What the New Name Omitted

The change came at a cost that some members felt immediately: the word “Christ” was dropped from the church’s formal name entirely, replacing a Christ-centered title with one built instead around “Saints” and “the latter days.” The name would not last as adopted. By revelation in April 1838, at Far West, Missouri, the church’s name was changed again, to “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” — a hybrid that restored Christ to the title but ran to thirteen syllables, considerably more cumbersome in ordinary speech than either of its two predecessors.

The Disputed Second Explanation

Beyond the standard branding account, at least one later historical review has floated a further, disputed possibility: that the timing of the 1834 change also served to put distance between the church’s new name and the debts and legal exposure already accumulating around its Kirtland-era leadership. This site treats that reading as a contested later interpretation rather than something the May 3 minutes themselves state or confirm, and notes it here primarily because the site’s own Chronology raises the same possibility without resolving it. Readers should weigh it as one disputed account among others, not as this site’s settled position.

Looking Past the Record: The 1838 Correction and Its Aftermath

This site’s documentary record ends at the May 3, 1834 vote, but the naming problem the vote created did not end there, and a brief look forward is useful context. The 1838 hybrid name restored theological balance on paper but proved too long for everyday use. Two shorthands filled the gap instead: “Mormon,” used almost universally by outsiders and the press, and “LDS,” adopted internally by members as a cleaner self-designation. Both compressions are ordinary linguistic behavior — long institutional names reliably get abbreviated in daily speech, regardless of the institution’s own preference.

The friction resurfaced in 2018, when church leadership launched a renewed effort to retire both “Mormon” and “LDS” from common use, citing the importance of keeping Christ’s name at the center of the church’s identity. The initiative ran into the same structural problem the 1834 and 1838 decisions had already created: the only short, natural-language alternative available to members — “LDS” — was itself a direct linguistic descendant of the 1834 name that had dropped “Christ” in the first place. Read this way, the 2018 effort was not simply a fresh initiative but the latest attempt to resolve a naming tension first created at the May 1834 Kirtland conference.