(thechurchnews.com July 23, 2024)
Which congregation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the longest continually running ward or branch of the Church?
If you think of the upcoming July 24 Pioneer Day anniversary commemorating the 1847 arrival of Latter-day Saint pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley and try to come up with a certain ward — any ward — in the Salt Lake area . . . well, you’re wrong.
In fact, the Church’s longest-running unit isn’t anywhere in or around the current state of Utah.
And if you think back to the early years of the Church, after its 1830 formal organization in New York and during the time Latter-day Saints resided in the Northeast and Midwest of the United States and wondering if a longer-operating unit might be found in Kirtland, Ohio, or Nauvoo, Illinois or the like . . . you’re still off.
The longest continually running ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the Preston Ward in Preston, England, active since being organized as the Preston Branch on Aug. 6, 1837.
The Church’s oldest still-operating unit has gone from a blossoming congregation in the heart of thriving British Isles missionary work in the mid-1800s to a branch of fewer than dozen members 90 years ago to a multicultural ward thriving and growing in the shadow of a Latter-day house of the Lord.
Preston Ward Bishop Bonno Rantsha says his ward enjoys “a rich history, which has seen many highs within the gospel and the overall Church history.”
Early history
Apostles Heber C. Kimball and Orson Hyde and five other missionaries arrived in Liverpool, England, on July 19, 1837, and felt guided to the city of Preston. They arrived in the middle of an election campaign with banners flying everywhere reading “Truth Shall Prevail,” a foreshadowing of the success that was to come.
Within 10 days, the missionaries had baptized the first English converts in the River Ribble. Historical records claim that more than 8,000 people came to witness the baptism of those nine people. A week later, 50 more were baptized.
In the first weeks, the small congregation used the parlor of the boarding house — at 21 Pole Street — of Ann Dawson, a widow and early convert. The street is still there, near the Preston bus station, but the house has been rebuilt. It was at the Dawson boarding house where missionaries confirmed 28 who had been baptized and then organized the first branch of the Church in Great Britain.
The branch quickly outgrew the parlor — membership was 160 by October 1837 — and started meeting outdoors before the missionaries gained used of the Cockpit, a late 18th century arena that could accommodate up to 700 and had been used for the since-banned sport of cock-fighting; it collapsed in the mid-1880s. The Cockpit was also the site where the worldwide temperance movement had started a few years before the Latter-day Saint congregation began using the building.
The branch later used many buildings around town, until a major building program was announced for the late 1950s and early 1960s for units across Great Britain, with new chapels being built. Members were told the meetinghouses would feature car parks (parking lots), which drew laughter, since few members had cars in those days.
A new chapel was built on Preston’s Ribbleton Avenue in the early 1960s. After a few decades, the building suffered from repeated damage and disrepair, with the surrounding area becoming increasingly unsafe; evening meetings were discontinued after members had been attacked at night near the meetinghouse. The Ribbleton Avenue building still stands and is used as a doctor’s surgical center.
In the early 1990s, a piece of land was obtained on Longsands Lane. The current meetinghouse there was built and opened in 1998, with the Preston Ward sharing the building with the South Ribble Ward, which was created in 2004.
Preston-area events with Church presidents
Over the past half-century, two presidents of the Church of Jesus Christ played key, in-person roles in helping the growth of the Preston Ward and surrounding areas.
In 1976, President Spencer W. Kimball — grandson of Heber C. Kimball — participated in the organization of the Preston England Stake and described the Preston area as “a great and important area of the Lord’s work. To me, this is the land of promise. From this people and this country could come a great people and great power to send the gospel throughout the world.”
Mindful of the early Church growth in Great Britain that started in Preston and how three times as many members lived in the British Isles than in the Salt Lake Valley area in the mid-1800s before the start of Latter-day Saint immigration from Europe across the Atlantic, President Kimball added: “This was the birthing place, in this area, and we are so happy now you can acquire stakehood.”
President Gordon B. Hinckley came in June 1998 to dedicate the Preston England Temple, located in nearby Chorley, about seven miles (11 kilometers) southeast of central Preston. Sitting adjacent to the house of the Lord on the temple grounds are the Preston England Stake Center and the England Missionary Training Center.
President Hinckley had served as a young full-time missionary in Great Britain and remembered arriving in Preston in 1933, recalling the Preston Branch then as “a weak outpost” with about 10 members in a rented room.
With a stake and nearby temple, the Preston Ward was anything but a weak outpost.
President Hinckley returned to Preston again in 2004 and acknowledged the longevity of the Preston Branch-turned-Ward.
“I have wandered around a little today through Preston, peered at the old digs where I once lived, went down into Avenham Park and walked on the old tram bridge and places that were familiar when I was here 72 years ago,” he said.
With gratitude, he noted having had the opportunity “of laboring in the oldest continuous congregation in the Church in all the world, the Preston Branch, which has become the Preston Ward. . . . Preston supersedes by 12 years any congregation in Utah or Salt Lake City or any place of that kind.”
The Church’s first stake in the Salt Lake Valley — the Salt Lake Stake — was organized on Oct. 3, 1847. But the first wards — a total of 19 — weren’t organized in the area until February 22, 1849, nearly 12 years after the creation of the Preston Branch.
Early Church leaders organized stakes, wards and branches in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois and Iowa between the organization of the Church in 1830 and the move of the Church and its members to the Salt Lake Valley, but those were discontinued after the mass exodus west.
The Preston Ward today
How would Bishop Rantsha describe the Preston Ward today?
“The Preston Ward is home to a faithful congregation who embrace each other’s differences and come together in their shared faith of Jesus Christ,” he said. “We are a diverse ward helping individuals and families feel a belonging. Through our various backgrounds, cultures and knowledge of the gospel, we are able to strengthen testimonies, grow in faith and gospel knowledge.”
Some families in the ward have escaped civil war, reaching Preston with little besides their faith and their desire to be close to the temple, he added.
And a meeting or activity for the Preston Ward today can look like global gathering. Bishop Rantsha clicks off the nationalities of ward members: Hungary, Romania, Chile, England, Denmark, Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe, Scotland, Nigeria, Angola, Brazil, Fiji, United States, Cuba, Sri Lanka, Botswana, Canary Islands, Italy, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Spain, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.
“Having members of this many nationalities, many of whom have learned about the gospel in their homelands, shows how the gospel is taught the same wherever you go in the world,” Bishop Rantsha said.
“This diversity strengthens testimonies and strengthens unity within our ward. Having very different upbringings has allowed each to use our experience to help with inclusivity, to help reach out to those who at first may feel alone. And it plays a great role with missionary work.”
Both Bishop Rantsha and Preston England Stake President Rafii Haji — who also resides in the Preston Ward — are representative of the multinational, multiethnic and multicultural ward and stake.
Bishop Rantsha was born in Botswana and raised with a knowledge and belief in God and the Bible. His mother passed away when he was 10, and four years later he went to Scotland to live with an older brother. “At 16, I had a number of questions surrounding my mother and if I would ever see her again,” he recalled. “I had been praying about the purpose of life and had started attending a church with a school friend.”
He and his brother were visiting a friend whose mother was a less-active Church member. Missionaries stopped in to visit her, with the young Bonno Rantsha asking them his questions. “I was taught the plan of salvation and felt the peace I had been seeking,” he said. “I was baptized three weeks later and went on to serve as a missionary in the England London South Mission.”
Bishop Rantsha and his wife met in 2016 and married in 2017; they are the parents of three children, having moved to Preston in 2020 with a desire to be closer to both her parents and the temple.
President Haji’s father is from Tanzania, his mother from Ireland, and he was born in California, where his mother joined the Church when he was 3 months old before moving back to Ireland about a year later.
After growing up in Ireland, President Haji moved with his wife and children — they now have four — to the United Kingdom in November 2018 to begin his current position as Preston England Temple recorder. He has been serving as stake president since October 2021.
“The Preston ward is quite a transient ward — “I’ve only been in the ward for four and a half years and Bishop Rantsha even less. But it is rich with history, and it is very multicultural.”
He too acknowledged the Preston England Temple in nearby Chorley as a draw for Latter-day Saints moving to the county of Lancashire in northwestern England.
“We find the ward to be very friendly and welcoming,” President Haji said. “Activities are wonderful, and the Primary is large, which can lead to noisy sacrament meetings, but it reminds me every time that our future is in good hands. We are growing too large for the building and look forward to an expansion, which is being explored.”
