John W. Bryant (born 1946) was the founder and first leader of a Mormon fundamentalist sect that is today known as the Church of the New Covenant in Christ and is headquartered in Salem, Oregon.

Conversion to Mormonism

In 1964 Bryant was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). As a member of the LDS Church, he served as a missionary in Japan. In the early 1970s, Bryant became convinced that the LDS Church had unjustifiably abandoned plural marriage, and joined the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB) in Utah, led by Rulon C. Allred.

Leader of polygamous sect

Beginning in 1974, Bryant began to state that he was receiving revelations from Jesus. He claimed that "John the Beloved" had visited him as an angel and instructed him to form an "Order of the Ancients". In 1975 he was taken in vision to the City of Enoch, where AUB founder Joseph White Musser and Latter Day Saint movement founder Joseph Smith, Jr. ordained him to the presidency of the church and the high priesthood.

In 1975 Bryant founded the Church of Christ Patriarchal, which was eventually renamed the Evangelical Church of Christ. Bryant received some support from some of the other members of the AUB, and in 1979 he and his followers moved to the Fair Haven Ranch near Las Vegas, Nevada. In 1981 the group moved to a farm near Salem, Oregon.

Sexual rites

Bryant was married to six wives. One of his wives, who ultimately left him, reported that Bryant began converting Mormon temple ordinances of sealing into "sexual rites".^[1] As reported by this wife,

Bryant would conduct a special "marriage ceremony before each time we had intercourse with someone we weren't married to. ... [I]f a single person were sealed into mine and John's family, then all the sexual rights of marriage existed within that unit as long as John approved." This applied to heterosexual and homosexual couplings .... the group soon attracted notoriety because of Bryant's expansion of the third level of ordinances — family sealings. He was sealed within many families, and "soon it was opened up so that sex, even incest, could be with almost anyone, anytime".^[1]

Reorganization of church

By the mid-1980s over 100 members of Bryant's church had moved into the Salem area. When the church attempted to convert a barn on the farm to a church building, it was blocked by neighborhood protests. Ultimately, Bryant left the church due to internal and external difficulties, and it soon disintegrated. However, in 1985 Bryant reorganized the church into the Church of the New Covenant in Christ, with a membership of approximately 120 families.

Notes

References

• Marsha King, "Changing beliefs led family to rearrange plural union", Seattle Times, 1985-10-13
• J. Gordon Melton (1996, 5th ed.). Encyclopedia of American Religions (Detroit, Mich.: Gale) p. 569
• Steven L. Shields (1990). Divergent Paths of the Restoration (Los Angeles: Restoration Press) p. 197

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