Joseph Fielding - Mission To England

Mission To England

Between 1837 and 1840, Fielding was called to leave his family and serve a mission to England. In June, he accompanied Heber C. Kimball, Orson Hyde, and other missionaries on the first foreign mission for the church. Fielding was ordained both an elder and a high priest while in England. The early success of the mission was due largely to the willingness of Joseph's brother, Rev. James Fielding, and later his brother-in-law, Rev. Timothy Mathews, to make their pulpits available to the missionaries. By 1838, nearly one thousand members had been baptized, and organized into twenty branches throughout the country. To Fielding's sorrow, his family's support for LDS preaching and missionary activities did not continue, doing some damage to relationships within the extended family.

Between 1838 and 1840, Fielding was left in charge of the mission when Kimball and Hyde returned to America in the spring of 1838. He acted as Mission President for the church, with Willard Richards as his first counselor and recent British convert William Clayton as his second counselor. Fielding married a newly baptized church member, Hannah Greenwood, on June 11, 1838. The couple had six children.

Fielding was released as mission president when Brigham Young and other apostles arrived in England in 1840, but continued to serve as a missionary until 1841. He and his wife left for the United States in 1841 and settled in Nauvoo, Illinois.

In his journal, Wilford Woodruff recorded that Fielding received his LDS temple endowment in the same session as William Wines Phelps, Levi Richards, Lot Smith, and Cornelius P. Lott in the office over Joseph Smith's store on December 9, 1843. Fielding took an addition plural wife, Mary Ann Peake Greenhalgh in either 1843 or 1846.