The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles is the second presiding body of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its twelve members are ordained for life and ranked strictly by the date of their ordination, which makes the line of succession to the presidency of the church visible years ahead. It meets weekly with the First Presidency in a room in the Salt Lake Temple, and when a president of the church dies it becomes the governing body of the movement outright until a new president is ordained.

Its published rule of decision is the feature outsiders find most surprising: the quorum acts only by unanimity. A matter on which the members do not all agree is not carried by a majority; it is deferred, sometimes for years, until either agreement is reached or the question lapses. The rule is stated in the church's own handbook and has been described publicly by apostles. It explains a great deal about the pace at which the church changes, and about why announcements, when they come, arrive without any public record of disagreement beforehand.

The quorum supervises the areas into which the church divides the world, calls and ordains general officers and stake presidents, dedicates temples, and sits on the boards governing the church's finances, universities and welfare system. Its members are sustained by the whole church as prophets, seers and revelators alongside the First Presidency.

The first Quorum of the Twelve was called in February 1835 at Kirtland, Ohio. The three surviving witnesses to the Book of Mormon, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and Martin Harris, chose the men, and the quorum's original charge was missionary rather than governing: it was a travelling council with authority in the world at large, while the organised stakes of the church were run by high councils. That distinction mattered at the time and disappeared entirely later.

Its formative undertaking was the mission to Britain of 1839 to 1841, during which the quorum, several of its members seriously ill on arrival, brought in several thousand converts and established the emigration route that reshaped the movement's demography for the rest of the century. It also established Brigham Young as the quorum's effective leader.

The 1830s were unstable in a way that the quorum's own composition records plainly: nine of the original twelve either left the movement or were excommunicated, several of them within five years. That figure is the best single measure of how uncertain the early church was.

Everything changed at Nauvoo in August 1844. With Joseph Smith dead and Sidney Rigdon claiming the guardianship of the church, the assembled Saints sustained the Quorum of the Twelve as the presiding authority. The quorum led the church through the exodus and governed alone until Brigham Young was ordained president in December 1847, and it has been the second body of the church ever since.