This comes from Gospel Tangent’s 4-part interview with Justin Francom, who is an independent Mormon fundamentalist. He helps run the Mormon Legacy Ministries, and is good friends with the people who maintain the fundamentalist Temple. Because of its historical significance of what Justin talks about, I have decided to condense it down into a narrative here.
You can listen to parts 1, 2, and 3 on youtube, but Rick wants you to sign up for the Gospel Tangents’ newsletter to get part 4, which is where this come from. I highly recommend you subscribe to the newsletter and listen to all 4 parts of the interview.
A couple of years ago the Missouri Temple was getting close to being finished, and they needed to hash out whether they were going to make the Temple available to black people and their descendants. At this point, this was still a contentious ongoing debate. It was decided that a special prayer meeting would be held to ask for inspiration.
This meeting was held in the unfinished Celestial Room of the Temple at 8:00pm with about 25 men in attendance. The meeting started with prayers, and then transitioned to the men sharing their perspectives on the priesthood ban. Some of them thought the ban was a mistake and wanted to abolish it, others wanted to maintain it because their ancestors had fought and died for it, and still others were somewhere in the middle. Many had strong feelings one way or the other.
Tom Zitting, who was leading the meeting, suggested that the men covenant to put aside their own beliefs, biases, and convictions on the priesthood ban, and present them on the altar. All the men symbolically put something on the altar as a way of signifying that they want what God wants, regardless of what their personal beliefs are. This gave way to a profound spirit of beauty, peace, and unity.
The unendowed men were then excused to pray in private, while the endowed men participated in the True Order of Prayer. After someone prayed, the group would then continue to talk amongst each other, and then they would again participate in the True Order of Prayer. Justin Francom, who was in attendance, was asked to lead a round of the True Order of Prayer. While he had participated in this many times, he had never led one. He was unsure of what the experience would be like or how it would settle the debate at hand.
After he starts the prayer, he has a vision, and then at the end of his vision he is unaware of what he said in the prayer.
This is his recounting of his vision:
As I began to pray, I beheld myself and the priesthood brethren who were praying with me standing around a stone altar. One by one, we opened our breasts and tore our living hearts out. We pulled our hearts out and we placed them on the altar in a token of sacrifice.
Somehow we’re still alive, and I look up and I see our Lord Jesus Christ standing above us wearing these white robes. As I watched, he stretched forth his arms and smiled in acceptance, showing he was happy with the sacrifice that we all had made.
Then suddenly the stone altar in front of me starts growing and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. I don’t know what happens to me; I just kind of zoomed out with as it grew. And it grows until it becomes this magnificent Temple that is now standing right there in Missouri.
And then I saw at first the local community in like a top-down view from the heavens. And I see the Temple in the center and just the little local community right there in Stockton. And I see these points of light, pin pricks of light. And they all come and they gather into the temple.
Then it zooms out and I see the whole nation and I see pin pricks of light all over the nation and they all come in and gather in that Temple.
Then it zooms out and there’s little pin pricks of light all over the earth and they all come and they and bring their light to that temple.
Basically, they all came and gathered to the Temple which grew from the stone altar upon which we had sacrificed our hearts.
The light was brilliant and reached the heavens and the vision closed.
Francom understood this prophecy to be conditional. The Temple would be accepted by the Lord and become a source of gathering a lot of good and light in the world IF those in attendance would be willing to sacrifice strongly-held convictions which supported the priesthood ban. If the men wouldn’t put their hearts on the altar, they wouldn’t have the Lord’s blessing and the Temple would probably be rejected.
Around 3 or 4am the unendowed men came back, and while they had some beautiful experiences – including the sharing of revelations and visions calling for the end of the priesthood ban – there was still not a conclusive answer. The majority of the men felt the ban needed to end, but there was not a unanimous agreement to accept those revelations and visions. For several more hours the men could not find a consensus.
As the morning sun started to rise, one of the sweetest, non-confrontational brethren stood up and the Spirit of the Lord overtook him. He said that they knew what was right and wrong and knew what they needed to do, and they needed to stop wasting time and do it.
With that, everybody agreed that black people and descendants of black people could worship in that Temple. The understanding is that this policy was brought about through revelation.