Hello, welcome back to Scripture Central. I'm Lynn Hilton Wilson, here to talk about

Come Follow Church History. Today, we're going to give a historical background for Section 25.

We get Emma, and I have one of the most studied scholars on Emma Hale-Smith with me, Mark Staker,

from the Church History Department. Welcome.

Thank you for having, man. I'm delighted to be here. We are so glad to have you here. We at

Scripture Central try very hard to use restored scriptures to illuminate Jesus Christ, and we want

to make him more accessible and defensible. And so today, as we dive into the historical background of Emma in Section 25 of the Doctrine Covenants,

we want to address some of these hard questions.

What do we know about Emma's childhood?

And I thought you would be the best person in the world to talk about this.

So I brought you in on that one.

Do we know anything about Emma's testimony and why didn't she

go west? And we'll just dive in. I'll probably start with a little historical background on when

this section came and then I want you to do most of the talking. Okay. We know the church was

organized on April 6th, 1830, but Emma doesn't come to that time.

And the first conference on June 9th, 1830, is also in the Peter Whitmer home, and Emma is there.

And so we have there at that conference, 30 members now are baptized.

Many friends are there.

Just as it was in the organization, they have the sacrament.

They have confirmations, priested ordinations. This is, you know, they don't have church meetings.

This is such an important gathering. There has been nothing where everyone's come together since

the organization's the church. It's really beautiful. There's prophecies given and visions given.

...