Wallace B. Smith, who led the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in an era marked by a new temple and the ordination of women, says he will retire as president-prophet in April 1996.
President Smith, 66, made the announcement Tuesday to church leaders gathered in Independence, Mo., by reading from a pastoral letter stating his intention to retire and designating W. Grant McMurray to succeed him.President McMurray, 48 and a native of Toronto, Canada, has been a counselor in the church's First Presidency since 1992. Previously he was church secretary. Earlier he served in the church's history department. He has served on the executive council of the Mormon History Association and on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Mormon History.
If approved at the 1996 World Conference, he would become the first president of the 135-year-old church not descended from Joseph Smith III.
The Reorganized Church emerged during the 1850s from a schism over leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after the death of church founder and Prophet Joseph Smith Jr. Joseph Smith's son, Joseph Smith III, assumed leadership of the RLDS Church in 1860.
Wallace B. Smith has been president of the church, which has about a quarter million members, since 1978. During his presidency the church built a $75 million, 300-foot-tall spiral temple and headquarters complex in Independence that was finished in 1992.
President Smith said he was designating his successor now "so there may be an orderly transition in leadership and to eliminate the speculation that otherwise might accompany such a change."
In 1984, President Smith announced a revelation encouraging the ordination of women to the priesthood. Some 4,200 women have been ordained since then. That announcement and the building of the new temple deepened decades-old divisions between the main RLDS congregation and dissenting congregations known as Restoration Branches.