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Yes, what else but home? It all depends on what you mean by home. . . .

‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.’

‘I should have called it Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

–Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”

As a missionary, I used to tell investigators a story (I think it came from a Paul Dunn talk) about a Mormon general authority’s conversation with the leader of another denomination. The Mormon asked his counterpart, “Who is the head of your church in Dubuque, Iowa?” The other leader (of course) replied, “Why I am the head of our Church in Dubuque, Iowa. Who is the head of your church in Dubuque, Iowa?” The Mormon leader smiled beatifically and replied, “Jesus Christ.” The point of the story was really simple: our church (but not yours) is the Lord’s.

It was also on my mission that I discovered the practical limitations of this theory of ownership. It happened in Stockton, California, after a long day of tracting. We came back to our car to find a huge dent and a waiting police officer. He told us that our car had been hit by a garbage truck and that, though the city was responsible, we had to come in and file some paperwork. Somehow it ended up that our registration material did not list the correct owner of the car, so the officer had to look it up. We tried all sorts of different ownership configurations: “Mormon Church,” “LDS Church,” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” “California Fresno Mission,” and even, because I was a confirmed smart-aleck, “Christ, J.” Nada. Finally, we heard the officer say “Bingo!” and read the correct information from a card: CORP-PRES-CHURCH—the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

This was when I first learned that the Church, along with being the Kingdom of God on Earth, was also a corporate entity. Actually (I have sense discovered) it is at least three corporate entities: the Corporation of the President, which handles the bank accounts, the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop, which owns the buildings, and Intellectual Reserve Inc., which owns the copyrights and trademarks. Whenever I read about a high-profile act of boundary maintenance in the Church—the excommunication of a Kate Kelly, say, or a John Dehlin—I try to remember that the institution maintaining its boundaries is one of several different things that we mean by “the Church”–only some of which you can actually be kicked out of.

It is fairly easy, for example, to get kicked out of the organization that that owned my mission car—let’s call it “the ChurchTM.” The corporate entities related to the LDS Church own stuff like buildings, including temples, and can decide who gets to go into them and what they get to do. Authorized agents of the organization—bishops and stake presidents for example—can define the corporation’s relationship to its members using any criteria that they want to use, from disciplinary councils to cat entrails. It works pretty much the same way at Wal-Mart.

It does not follow that getting kicked out of “the Church” in this sense automatically affects one’s status in “the Church” as it exists in the mind of God. Once upon a time people thought that it did: excommunicates were “cast into outer darkness” and “handed over to the buffetings of Satan,” with the clear implication that ecclesiastical officials had the power to act in the name of God in ways that the latter had to recognize. Today’s ChurchTM wisely declines to claim this level of infallibility. Leaders at all levels can be, and have been, fallible. We know this, but acknowledging it has consequences–one of which is admitting that God does not have to disown, nor does Satan have to buffet, anyone on the basis of their affiliation with the guys who own the buildings.

Ultimately, people like me have very little input into the governance of either the ChurchTM or the Church in the Mind of God. But there is a third sense in which Latter-day Saints often talk about “the Church” that, I believe, we all have the power to affect. The Church in this sense refers to the community of saints formed by people who have made sacred spiritual commitments to each other. This “the Church” goes by several different names. Early Christians called it the ekklēsía, and some religious people today know it as “the Mystical Body of Christ.” Latter-day Saints usually call it Zion.

“The Church” in this sense not the type of thing that you can get kicked out of. The Body of Christ does not have an org chart. It does not come into being with articles of incorporation. It is defined solely by the covenants that we make with each other: to mourn together, to draw strength from one another, to bear each other’s burdens, and to jointly turn our weaknesses into strengths. Anybody who has a desire to build Zion is called to the work. Nobody who makes these commitments can be excommunicated for the simple reason that the commitments and the communion are the same thing.

I generally do not complain when an authorized agent severs the institutional connection between the ChurchTM and somebody that it sees—rightly or wrongly—as a critic. But neither do I confuse corporate brand management with the voice of God. Institutional decisions like these simply do not have anything to do with my own commitments to love, respect, and comfort my brothers and sisters. Institutional relationships—which are the only kinds of relationships that corporate entities can create and sever—are tragic parodies of genuine human connection, which requires hard work and commitment and never goes through a file marked CORP-PRES-CHURCH. It is the potential to form such deep human connections that makes us human, and it is the fact of our doing so that makes us saints.