When Ogden’s Michelle Phillips learned back in 2013 that fellow Latter-day Saint women were advocating for priesthood ordination, her first response was “a lot of anger” toward the feminist agitators.
“I would,” Phillips recalled, “say things like, ‘Why don’t they just leave the church?’”
More than a decade later, the new Community of Christ elder is preparing to take up the mantle of the first woman to lead her new faith’s Inland West Mission Center, a geographic region that includes the top half of Utah, all of Idaho and parts of Wyoming and Washington.
Her ascension, planned for late September, will also mark the first time a Utahn and a former member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will fill the part-administrative and part-pastoral position that functions as a rough equivalent to a Latter-day Saint area president.
Phillips acknowledged the assignment was never the obvious outcome for someone who long prided herself as a devout member of the Utah-based faith.
“My past self,” she said, smiling, “would be horrified with where I’ve ended up.”
And that might be exactly why she’s the right woman for the job.
‘I just started crying’
The first time Phillips encountered Community of Christ, which, at a quarter million members, is the second-largest denomination (after the Salt Lake City-based church of 17.5 million members) to claim Joseph Smith as its founder, she was serving a Latter-day Saint mission.
She had been stationed in Independence, Missouri, headquarters of the faith formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And she thought the sister sect, with its belief in the Book of Mormon but not Brigham Young and his successors, was “a little weird.”
“In the Missionary Training Center, they teach you that if you get people to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it, they’ll know Joseph Smith was a prophet and they will join your church,” Phillips, now 41, recalled. “And then you show up in Missouri, and it doesn’t really work that way.”
(Michelle Phillips) Phillips first encountered Community of Christ while a young Latter-day Saint missionary stationed in Missouri, headquarters of her new faith.
Rather than letting the experience challenge her faith, she doubled down. Upon returning home, she married her now ex-husband in the temple and gave birth to two boys, now ages 15 and 13. When the Ordain Women movement emerged, she joined the ranks of those criticizing the group.
That is, until she found herself listening to a radio interview of the movement’s leaders.
“I was sitting in my car, and I just started crying,” she said, her voice wobbling with emotion at the memory. “I realized that the reason I was so angry was that I was one of them and that I shared a lot of their frustrations and a lot of their hurt.”
In 2016, she started attending Community of Christ services, first in Salt Lake City and later in Ogden. Six years later, she was baptized, an event her baffled-yet-supportive family attended.
(Michelle Phillips) Phillips was baptized Jan. 9, 2022, six years after she started investigating Community of Christ.
One reason for the yearslong wait to enter the waters, she said, was a sense of loyalty to her pioneer ancestry, and in particular her foremothers, who sacrificed so much for their Latter-day Saint faith.
“They left their homes, their churches, their homelands and their families,” she said, “because they felt called.”
Phillips couldn’t bear the idea of letting them down by cutting ties with the church they had given everything to build. That fear slowly faded, however, based on a series of experiences in which she “felt like they were giving me their blessing, that they understood that I wasn’t turning my back on their sacrifices. Rather, I was carrying on their legacy” of stepping into the unknown in response to God’s guidance.
Last September, she was officially ordained an elder. One of the two individuals to put their hands on her head was a woman who also happened to be a former Latter-day Saint.
(Michelle Phillips) In 2024, Phillips was ordained an elder in her new faith by Brittany Mangelson, a fellow former Latter-day Saint, and high priest John VanDerWalker.
As fate would have it, 2024 also happened to be the year Phillips and women’s ordination in Community of Christ both turned 40.
“I love to tell people,” she said, “that we’ve been ordaining women as long as I’ve been alive.”
Called to serve — again
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Michelle Phillips, a Latter-day Saint turned Community of Christ member, gives a tour of her parish in Ogden on Wednesday, May 21, 2025.
As a mission center president, Phillips will be responsible for the mundane and the metaphysical. A leaky roof, a conflict between members, a parishioner in crisis — she’s there. She will also be fielding calls from church headquarters, which will rely on her for regular reports on the church’s status in her region.
“One of the biggest jobs of the mission center president,” she said, “is being the liaison between local leadership and the world church.”
Another: inviting and welcoming new faces to help replenish the ranks of an aging church.
Phillips, a whiz at search engine optimization, sees room for improvement when it comes to making her church more visible in the place where so many today go in search of new community: the internet.
“There are some gaps in [our online] communication,” she said, “that I think I have a unique experience to help fill.”
But, according to Brittany Mangelson, pastor of Salt Lake City’s Community of Christ congregation, a background in newsletters and website management is just a small part of what qualifies Phillips for helping to grow the faith’s ranks.
More importantly, said Mangelson, a former Latter-day Saint herself, is the fact that Phillips “has been hurt by a church before.”
The way the pastor sees it “if folks are coming to her with conflicts [with their previous faiths], she can help them navigate those.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Phillips points out photos used in a Sunday school lesson on sacred sites at her parish in Ogden.
In Utah, as well as places like Pocatello and Boise, Idaho, Phillips said, that means equipping “invitation ministers” specifically to welcome former Latter-day Saints.
“For me,” Phillips explained, “Community of Christ was a place to be able to honor my heritage while also expanding…my view of God and myself and the world.”
She hopes to offer a helping hand to those looking for the same.
In other words, Phillips won’t be wearing a plastic nametag this time. But, in many ways, the single mother of two is returning to the mission field, where once again she’ll be testifying of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. The only thing that’s changed? Her church.
