Francis Gladden Bishop Baptized into the Restored Church After Years of Seeking

For seven years after his early vision during the Finney revivals, Francis Gladden Bishop of Greece, New York, continued his spiritual search. He served as a minister in the Freewill Baptist Church by 1831, earnestly seeking the fullness of gospel truth he felt was missing from the Christianity of his day. Then in the summer of 1832, LDS missionaries arrived in western New York bearing the message of the Restoration. When he heard their testimony of Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the restored priesthood, something deep within him recognized this as the fulfillment of what his early vision had promised. On July 2, 1832, at Olean Point (later Olean), Cattaraugus County, New York, Francis Gladden Bishop was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and ordained an elder—all on the same day. The swiftness of his ordination testified to the spiritual gifts already recognized in him. He was twenty-three years old. His conversion was the fruit of years of prayerful seeking, beginning with that vision as a teenager during the revivals of Charles Finney. Within a year, he had left his home and begun preaching the gospel as a missionary, carrying the restored truth from North Carolina to Upper Canada across nearly a decade of service.

Recording note: No verbatim first-person account of Francis Gladden Bishop's 1832 baptism survives in public archival sources. His life is documented in the Joseph Smith Papers' biographical register, the Church History Biographical Database, and Richard LaVell Saunders' master's thesis 'Francis Gladden Bishop and Gladdenism' (Utah State University, 1989) — all third-person treatments of a man who had himself recorded an early vision during the Finney revivals and spent seven years seeking the church he believed that vision had promised.

Fuller account of this event (the complete account as preserved in Francis Gladden Bishop – Biography, The Joseph Smith Papers):

Baptized into Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and ordained an elder, 2 July 1832, in Olean Point (later Olean), Cattaraugus Co., New York.