In the Salt Lake City congregation of Community of Christ there was a newly-widowed polyamorous woman. Instead of providing solace and pastoral care as her and her family were grieving, Community of Christ’s leadership chose to take action to attempt to remove her from priesthood due to her being polyamorous.
The Salt Lake City congregation found this abhorrent and demanded that their apostle, Robin Linkhart, come down and speak with them. Robin spoke with the congregation on October 22nd, 2022 at 2PM Mountain Time.
Many started seeing similarities to the LDS church’s “Rescues”, such as what happened in Sweden and Boise, and so this meeting came to be known as “The Salt Lake Rescue”. Further, like in the LDS church, members of Community of Christ were concerned about keeping the church’s leadership accountable for what was said in regards to that extraordinarily sensitive topic. Since Utah is a one-party consent state, this meeting was legally recorded and is in full compliance with Utah Code 77-23a-4.
The transcriber was given audio recordings of the meeting and went word-by-word through hours of audio to transcribe it.
In the process of transcription, names of those in attendance have been anonymized to “(Attendee)” or “(Moderator)”. This makes it a bit confusing when referencing other people or what was said earlier, but the anonymity of those in the Rescue was more important than the clarity for the reader. The only exception to this is the church’s leaders who are being held accountable and the woman who was disciplined, who upon her request is using the pseudonym “Vanessa”.
A genuine effort has been made to make a transcript of the recording. That said, this was a difficult topic, and many people were fighting back tears as they spoke or otherwise weren’t well heard, which made transcribing rather difficult. When a section of the audio just could not be discerned, the symbol “�” was added to indicate that a transcription was not possible.