Temples: the building you will only see from the outside, and the six-month exception

Work on the Salt Lake Temple started on February 14, 1853, and the cornerstone was laid on April 6 that year. Quartz monzonite came by ox cart, then by rail, from Little Cottonwood Canyon about 20 miles southeast, and the building took 40 years; Wilford Woodruff, the Church president when the capstone went on in 1892, asked that the interior be finished within a year so that the dedication could fall on April 6, 1893, forty years to the day. The 2019 renovation, announced that April, was mostly about the ground. Crews excavated beneath the 185-million-pound structure and set it on hundreds of seismic base isolators, threaded 46 post-tension cables through the stone walls, and designed the result to ride out a magnitude 7.3 earthquake, the largest the Salt Lake Valley is expected to produce. The number of sealing rooms went from 13 to 22, which matters on a Saturday afternoon when weddings stack up. The open house that follows, April 5 to October 1, 2027, will be the longest in Church history; the previous record was 85 days at Saratoga Springs in 2023, and the original 1893 opening allowed the public a single day. Reservations open on September 1, 2026.

The confusion is understandable. The building a member drives to on Sunday is a meetinghouse: a chapel, classrooms, a kitchen, offices for the bishop and clerks, and a gym the Church calls a cultural hall. Anyone may walk in, and the buildings host funerals, wedding receptions and community events. There were 32,046 wards and branches at the end of 2025, and the meetinghouses that serve them look much the same from Boise to Bangkok. A temple is something else. The Church's own description is that temples "are literally houses of the Lord", places where members make covenants and where a set of rites is performed that happens nowhere else: baptism on behalf of dead ancestors, an instructional ceremony called the endowment, and the sealing of marriages and families, which members believe binds them beyond death. There is no weekly congregation and no sermon. Members book a session and attend during the week or on Saturday; temples are closed on Sunday. The Church's summary of the relationship is that everything else it does, the meetings, the missionaries and the lessons, leads toward what is done in the temple.

Entry requires a recommend, a card issued after two interviews, one with the bishop and one with a member of the stake presidency, to a member who has been baptized at least a year. On October 6, 2019, Church president Russell M. Nelson read out the current list of fifteen questions at general conference; the Church said the revision was meant to clarify, not change, the standard. A selection of what is asked:

• Do you have faith in and a testimony of God, the Eternal Father; His Son, Jesus Christ; and the Holy Ghost?
• Do you strive to be honest in all you do?
• Are you a full-tithe payer?
• Do you understand and obey the Word of Wisdom?
• Do you keep the Sabbath day holy?
• Are you current on any financial obligations to a former spouse or to children?
• Do you consider yourself worthy to enter the Lord's house?

Three of those questions are about money, drink and honesty, which is why a recommend functions inside the community as a rough proxy for someone who pays what they owe. After the endowment, members wear a white undergarment beneath their clothes, the temple garment, which the Church standardized as white in 1893; question thirteen asks whether they wear it as instructed. Youth and new converts get a limited-use recommend for baptisms only. A recommend that lapses can be renewed by repeating the interviews.

The first temple was dedicated in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1836. For most of the twentieth century there were a few dozen. The count now changes every conference, so any figure needs a date attached.

"We warmly invite our friends to come and learn about God's plan for His children." Russell M. Nelson

For a business reader the temple shows up as a calendar. General conference, the Church's twice-yearly gathering, falls on the first weekend of April and October, with sessions at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Mountain Time on both days, broadcast from the 21,000-seat Conference Center in Salt Lake City in more than 100 languages; it has met in the city every year since 1848 except 1877. Do not schedule a Utah kickoff for that Saturday. July 24 is Pioneer Day, a state holiday marking the 1847 arrival in the valley, when government offices and many businesses close and the Days of '47 parade shuts downtown. Sundays are the recurring case: City Creek Center, the Church-owned mall across from Temple Square, closes its stores; Larry H. Miller stayed away from his own Utah Jazz on Sunday game nights from 1985 until his death in 2009. Temple open houses have become civic events in their own right, and a six-month one in 2027 will bring tour groups through downtown Salt Lake at a scale hotels have already started planning for.

Then there are the things you will not be invited to. A colleague's temple wedding is a sealing, and only recommend holders enter; non-member family wait outside or attend a separate ring ceremony, which is why a Utah wedding invitation sometimes reads oddly to an outsider. Members serving as temple presidents leave their careers entirely: Alan Ashton, who took almost $700 million in Novell stock when WordPerfect sold in 1994, ran the Provo temple with his wife from 2013 to 2016. Bill Marriott was married in the Salt Lake Temple in 1955, and as a bishop from 1975 to 1977 he was the one asking the interview questions of his congregation while running the hotel company. Mitt Romney did the same in Belmont, Massachusetts, from 1981 to 1986. The point for a manager is not the doctrine. It is that the person across the table may hold a card that says they pay their debts and their tithe, that they were asked about it by two people who know them, and that they will be at a temple on a Saturday rather than at your offsite.