First female prophet-president says her church is in a ‘financially strong position’ after selling the Kirtland Temple

Stassi Cramm did not spend her childhood fantasizing about becoming the first female prophet-president in Community of Christ’s 165-year history.

Indeed, Cramm did not originally plan for a life of ministry in the church, which, like the much-larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, traces its origins to Joseph Smith.

But sometimes, Cramm says, God has other plans for you.

Earlier this month, she was ordained to the highest office in Community of Christ after nearly a quarter century of full-time ministry.

She is ready to help the faith, formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, move forward boldly into an even more inclusive, global church.

Here are lightly edited excerpts from The Salt Lake Tribune’s “Mormon Land” podcast in which Cramm discusses her background; the faith’s finances; its relationship with the Utah-based religion; and her hopes for the future.

What did you originally plan to do with your life?

I was born into the church. My parents were both members. My mom actually was a convert when she was pregnant with me. So I tease people that I actually have been baptized twice, once with my mom and once by myself. My dad, his sister and his mom joined Community of Christ — what was then the RLDS Church — when he was a teenager. They moved to this farm town, and that was the church at the end of the block where their house was. So they became avid participants in the church. Then my parents got married, and I grew up in the church. When I was a kid, I dreamed about everything from being a superhero to being a doctor to everything in between. But as I went through high school, I found that I was really drawn toward math and science. I ended up going to the University of Illinois to get an engineering degree, meeting my husband and getting married. He had a military career in the Air Force and was assigned to Edwards Air Force Base in California. My first job out of college was at the base, so the flight test became the way that my engineering career got launched. It’s while we were in California in the mid-1980s — when section 156 of our Doctrine and Covenants allowed women to be ordained — that my thoughts about church and ministry and what maybe God wanted me to do started to take a brand-new direction.

How did your college education prepare you for the ministry?

Engineers are problem solvers. Sometimes it is things that are broken, and we try to figure out how to fix them. Those things could be processes, or the way that people interact with the world, and they’re looking for new ways to interact. You learn to imagine the world in a way of what it could be, not just what it is. In a way, engineers have an essence of [prophetic imagination.] That’s the role of our call as followers of Christ. What does God want the world to be? How do we imagine it? And then how do we make it happen?

How did being ordained change your life? Did the church feel different after that?

Women have a different way of seeing the world, and that’s not to say that men see the world one way and women see the world another way because, really, humanity has this broad spectrum, and we all come with different giftedness. If we’re measuring genders as male and female only, then you’re leaving out a huge element of that spectrum. The experience of seeing what needs are around the world, what ministry opportunities exist, what people will help them form their faith, there is starting to be a whole new set of insights as to how that might occur. In general, women, historically and statistically, have been more community builders because women have had to survive in often very patriarchal societies. The way that they made things happen was by grouping and working together.

How would you describe this moment in Community of Christ?

Our world conference began the week before what the Christian calendar would mark as Pentecost. I would say that during that week, Community of Christ had our own modern-day Pentecost experience, where we just felt an outpouring of God’s blessings, where we celebrated the opportunity to be together. One of our people made the comment, “Some people say Community of Christ is in decline, along with the rest of Christianity, but this doesn’t feel like a church that’s dying. This feels like a church that’s being reborn.” I would underscore that. There was so much excitement about the future, about the resolutions that we were working on, about our sense and call to be actively engaged in our communities and cultures working for social justice in tangible, actionable ways. There was such a strong sense of belonging and being together. It far exceeded all of our expectations and reminded everyone that, with God, anything is possible and that we need to remember to dream big.

What’s the church’s financial standing right now — more than a year after selling the Kirtland Temple to the Utah-based faith?

The church is in a financially strong position, and we’re currently working on what we refer to as our five-year financial plan that takes us from 2025 to 2030. That financial plan allows us to continue to sustain the level of employment that we currently have employed around the world, and allows us to, at a minimum, maintain the level of ministries and services that we’re providing now beyond 2030, depending on inflation around the world and all those other factors. We will have to continue to increase our income sources, or we will start to bump into troubles in 2030 and beyond. But that’s true of any organization that’s dependent on people and goodwill and the generosity of supporters.

Unlike the much larger and, frankly, much, much wealthier LDS Church, Community of Christ issues detailed financial reports. Do your members appreciate that transparency?

I don’t know. I guess you’d have to poll our members. I think some of them do.... What’s most important is that we want people to know that leaders want to be held accountable for the financial decisions that we’re making....We have filters that we don’t invest in certain companies because they do not align with our identity and message, and so we want to be very clear about that. We feel like that that’s part of our stewardship and part of our discipleship and message to the world.

You have a diverse presidency. Did you choose your counselors?

Yes, I called my two counselors as well as all the members of the Council of the Twelve [Apostles] and our new presiding evangelist and our new president of the high priest quorum. I’m very excited for our new presidency as it’s forming. Bunda C. Chibwe is a Zambian resident by origin, but he also has his U.S. citizenship. He has a home in Zambia and a home in Independence, [Missouri,] so he spends time in both places. Janne C. Grover is an American citizen, born and raised in the central part of the United States, but she has traveled for the church and been to many, many of our churches around the world. They both bring different talents into the presidency.

Do you feel Community of Christ Church has lost anything by distancing itself from the Utah-based faith?

I don’t actually think of us as distancing ourselves from the LDS Church. I don’t think of ourselves as actually having been associated with the LDS Church. We understand we have common roots … 14 years with Joseph Smith Jr. Upon his death, there was Brigham Young and others who decided to go west. In my mind, I always think of that as the beginning of the LDS Church that we know today. For our church, we bubbled out of those who remained behind and who sort of waited for Joseph Smith III to be in a position where he could lead this movement. Over the decades, we used our best sense and understanding of what we perceived God wanted us to be about. I assume that the LDS Church did that also, and that has led to two very different theological groups.

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