The First Presidency

The First Presidency is the highest governing body of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: the president of the church and two counsellors, occasionally more, whom he selects himself and who serve at his pleasure. It holds the executive authority of the movement. The letters that direct practice in every congregation worldwide are issued over its signatures, and on doctrine and on the calling of general officers it acts jointly with the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

Its most distinctive feature is that it is not a permanent institution. The First Presidency exists only while there is a president, and on his death it dissolves at once. Its counsellors, who are almost always apostles, resume their seats in the Quorum of the Twelve at their original seniority, as though the intervening years in the presidency had not occurred, and the church is governed by the Twelve until a new president is ordained and forms a new First Presidency by choosing new counsellors. A man may therefore be a counsellor in the First Presidency, return to the Twelve, and later be called back, and several have.

The arrangement is deliberate. It prevents a presidency from outliving the president who formed it, and it removes any question of a counsellor having a claim on the succession, which is settled entirely by seniority in the Twelve.

The gap between the death of one president and the ordination of the next was, in the nineteenth century, measured in years. Joseph Smith died in June 1844 and Brigham Young was not ordained president until December 1847, a gap of more than three years during which the Quorum of the Twelve governed the church through the expulsion from Nauvoo, the winter at Winter Quarters and the first crossing to the Salt Lake Valley. Young died in August 1877 and John Taylor was not ordained until October 1880. Taylor died in July 1887 and Wilford Woodruff was not ordained until April 1889, a delay prolonged by the federal prosecutions of the polygamy period, during which the senior leadership of the church was in hiding.

The pattern ended in 1898, when Lorenzo Snow reorganised the presidency within days of Woodruff's death, and every reorganisation since has followed within a fortnight. What changed was not doctrine but circumstance and confidence: by 1898 the seniority rule was settled beyond dispute, and there was no longer any advantage in leaving the church under the collective government of the Twelve.

The intervals are worth recording because they show what the modern rule is for. The church spent almost seven of its first sixty years with no president at all, governed by a council, and survived it. The speed of the modern succession is an institutional preference rather than a doctrinal necessity.