For more than a century, leadership of the Reorganized Church passed within the family of founder Joseph Smith: Joseph Smith III led from 1860 to 1914, followed by his sons Frederick M. Smith and Israel A. Smith, and then his grandson W. Wallace Smith, whose tenure ran into the 1970s. This hereditary pattern, while never doctrinally mandated as an absolute rule, gave the young reorganization a continuity of leadership that helped distinguish it from the larger Utah church in its members' eyes.
The pattern ended in 1996, when Wallace B. Smith, the last family member to serve, was succeeded by W. Grant McMurray, the first Prophet-President chosen from outside the founding family. Since then the office has been filled through a process the church describes as discernment, in which the sitting Prophet-President and church leadership identify a successor, who is then presented to and sustained by the church's World Conference, its representative governing body.
The shift away from a hereditary line accompanied Community of Christ's broader modernization, including the ordination of women to its priesthood beginning in 1984, a step that further separated its trajectory from other branches of the Latter Day Saint movement and underscored that its authority structures, unlike the apostolic seniority system used by the Utah-based church, had never been fixed by an unalterable rule.