As Parley P. Pratt, Oliver Cowdery, Ziba Peterson, and Peter Whitmer Jr. left Kirtland and moved on to other fields of labor, they left over one hundred converts who had plenty of zeal but little experience or direction. There were no instructional handbooks, no leadership training meetings, no broadcasts of general conference—in fact, there weren’t even very many copies of the Book of Mormon to go around. Many of these new believers had been drawn to the restored gospel by the promise of marvelous manifestations of the Spirit, especially those they knew about from studying the New Testament (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 12:1–11). [Read More]
