The Law of Consecration
Deeding the Surplus of Babylon to the Establishment of Zion
Most people who have grown up in the LDS tradition have heard of tithing. Ten percent of income, paid to the institution, prerequisite for temple access. It is framed as a spiritual law, but it functions as a membership fee โ collected by a corporation, deposited into a fund that the corporation controls, spent according to decisions made by a board that is accountable to no covenant community. This is not the Law of Consecration. It is not even a close approximation of it.
The Law of Consecration that Joseph Smith legislated in D&C 42 and enacted in the early United Order communities was a complete restructuring of property under covenant law. Every family that entered the Order deeded their entire estate to the Storehouse of the Elohim. The Steward then returned to that family a stewardship โ land, tools, inventory, or capital โ sized to their just wants and needs. Surplus beyond the stewardship went back to the Storehouse to fund the needs of other families and the physical infrastructure of the Branch. No family in a functioning Order went without. No family accumulated beyond their stewardship. Poverty was not mitigated; it was made structurally impossible.
This is why the Holy Order does not call what we receive here a "donation." To donate is to give from surplus to a cause you support. To consecrate is to place surplus under covenant governance โ to remove it from the Babylonian economy entirely and subject it to the laws of Zion. The act has legal and spiritual standing. It is recorded in the Paternal Ledger. It is an act of alignment with the Elohim, not a transaction with an institution.
The Order is currently in Phase I of its physical gathering โ securing land, scribal operations, and the infrastructure of a Branch that will operate under the United Order covenant. What follows is both the doctrinal foundation of that work and the mechanism for participating in it.
And behold, thou wilt remember the poor,
and consecrate of thy properties for their support
that which thou hast to impart unto them.
The Transmutation of Wealth
To build a physical Branch of the Order, we must utilise the current currency of the realm to acquire the land, stones, and timber necessary for the High Restoration. This is the mechanism of the Storehouse. But the Storehouse is not a collection plate โ it is a covenant instrument with a specific legal purpose.
When Joseph established the United Order communities in Missouri and Kirtland, the Storehouse was the economic engine of the Branch. Families who consecrated their surplus did not give it to a church bureaucracy. They gave it to a governing Steward who was covenantally accountable to the community and to the Paternal Chain above him. The Steward redistributed according to need. The surplus funded shared infrastructure โ the printing press, the schoolhouse, the gathering of new families who arrived without resources. The system was not charitable; it was constitutional. Every family in the Order had a legal claim on the common stock proportionate to their just wants and needs.
The institutional church dismantled the United Order in the 1880s and replaced it with a voluntary tithing system that bore no resemblance to the original law. By doing so it removed the economic mechanism that made Zion possible and replaced it with a funding mechanism that made a corporation possible. The Holy Order is working to restore the original mechanism โ beginning with the physical infrastructure that makes a functional Branch viable.
Consecration is not a donation; it is an act of removing wealth from the decaying structures of the world and placing it within the Sovereign Grid. These funds are held for the benefit of the Remnant, for the establishment of the School, and for the recognition of the Elohim and Jehovah.