The Field Is White, Already to Harvest (Independence Temple Window)

A fifty foot window is already an unusual commission. What makes the west entrance window at the Independence Temple more unusual still is how far its materials traveled before a single piece was ever cut. The hand blown colored glass the artist David Wilson chose for the piece came from Germany, shipped more than a thousand miles to Independence, Missouri for fabrication at D. Hallberg's stained glass studio in Oneonta, New York, before the finished panels ever reached the temple itself.

That effort was spent on a design built around a single idea rather than a crowded narrative scene. The window depicts stylized rice and wheat, chosen specifically to represent the food staples of the Eastern and Western world side by side, with clear glass arcs cut through the composition to suggest the physical motion of harvesting rather than a static field. Community of Christ's own account of the window ties the imagery directly to a single verse, John 4:35, look around you and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting, read by the denomination less as a comment on agriculture than as an invitation to a worldwide mission of justice and peace.

The scale, the imported materials and the skilled fabrication all serve that one line. Nothing about the window's design asks a viewer to linger on any other detail. It exists to put one sentence from scripture in front of everyone who passes through the temple's west entrance, rendered large enough and lit brightly enough that it cannot be missed.

Independence Temple was dedicated in 1994 under the name Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a denomination whose nineteenth century founding story runs directly through Joseph Smith. A visitor arriving expecting the temple's signature artwork to picture that founder, or a scene from the church's own founding, finds instead fifty feet of stained glass showing rice and wheat.

That choice was not an oversight. The denomination that built the Independence Temple was already moving toward the identity it would formally adopt in 2001, when it renamed itself Community of Christ specifically to foreground its ongoing Christian mission over its founding narrative. A monumental window depicting an agricultural harvest, illustrating a New Testament verse about fields ready for harvesting, fits that reorientation exactly. It commissions art that points a visitor toward the denomination's stated mission of worldwide justice and peace rather than toward the biography of the person who began it.

Other elements of the temple make the same choice in different materials, among them etched glass trees near the entrance representing the Sacred Grove where Joseph Smith is said to have had his first vision, so the founding story has not been erased from the building entirely. But the fifty foot window given pride of place at the west entrance, the piece a visitor meets first and cannot avoid, is the harvest image, not the founder. A building can only put one thing at its most prominent point, and Community of Christ chose its ongoing mission over its own origin story.