Church of the Firstborn
Church of the Firstborn belongs to the Latter Day Saint movement family of churches.
Governance: hierarchical.
A name used by several distinct small groups in the Latter Day Saint restoration tradition — a string, not a single church.
Heritage
The name Church of the Firstborn, drawn from Hebrews 12:23 and from Latter Day Saint scripture, has been adopted by several unrelated small groups across the movement's history, from the 1860s Morrisites to twentieth-century fundamentalist offshoots. The groups so named share the name and little else; no single founding story covers them.
Theological family
Varies by group; the bodies using the name generally stand in the Latter Day Saint restoration tradition, which trinitarian churches differ with over authority and Scripture — a disagreement recorded here, not adjudicated.
Who decides what
Varies by group; most have been small and leader-centered.
What a first-time visitor would find
No general statement is possible; the groups are distinct.
What it has always cared about
The name itself, and the scriptural hope it points to, is the one thread.
Its gift to the wider church
Chiefly a lesson for anyone building a church directory: a shared name can conceal entirely separate bodies, and this string is among the clearest examples in our data.
Commonly confused with
Each group using the name is confused with the others; none should be assumed connected to the LDS Church, and some twentieth-century groups using it have histories the LDS Church has explicitly repudiated.
Range of views inside it
The variation is total: this record covers a name, not a body.
A note from the mapmakers: This is a grouping record for a shared name, deliberately minimal because the groups are distinct and small. No US congregation count is published in RCMS 2020, and none is offered here. Nothing may be asserted of any specific congregation bearing this name — least of all which group it belongs to; a congregation's own materials are the only reliable guide.
Sources: Encyclopedia of American Religions (J. Gordon Melton, Gale) · Scattering of the Saints: Schism within Mormonism (Newell G. Bringhurst and John C. Hamer, eds., John Whitmer Books)
More of the Latter Day Saint movement story · Find these churches on the map