Dedication, open house set for Orem temple; Provo temple to close

Publish date: 2024-04-26

As The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints readies to open a new temple in Utah, it also prepares to close another, long-serving temple less than five miles away.

On Tuesday, June 20, the Church’s First Presidency released the dedication and open house dates for the Orem Utah Temple and the closure date of the Provo Utah Temple.

The Orem temple will be dedicated on Sunday, Jan. 21, 2024, in two sessions, at 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. The dedicatory sessions will be broadcast to all meetinghouses in the Orem Utah Temple district.

A public open house will run this fall from Friday, Oct. 27, through Saturday, Dec. 16, excluding Sundays and Thanksgiving Day. A media day is scheduled for Monday, Oct. 23, with special-guest tours set for Tuesday through Thursday, Oct. 24-26.

And the Provo temple — with its planned reconstruction including a major redesign and extensive exterior overhaul — will close at the end of the day on Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024.

The dates for the two temples were first published Tuesday, June 20, on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.

While the dates are new, the open-and-close tandem announcement is not. After identifying 13 locations for new temples in his concluding remarks at the October 2021 general conference, President Russell M. Nelson also announced the “reconstruction of the Provo Utah Temple after the Orem Utah Temple is dedicated.”

In November 2021, the Church released an exterior rendering of the redesigned Provo temple, which will remain at the same location at the mouth of Rock Canyon on Provo’s east bench.

The extreme makeover will be similar to that of its sister sacred edifice, the Ogden Utah Temple, which a decade ago underwent a major renovation and architectural change unlike any other of the Church’s temples.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has reaffirmed the primary purpose of its houses of the Lord is to draw people closer to God and His Son, Jesus Christ, through worship, instruction and unifying sacred ordinances, with the temples’ exterior and interior designs and elements secondary to that purpose.

Orem Utah Temple

A temple for Orem was one of eight locations announced on Oct. 5, 2019, by President Nelson during the Saturday evening women’s session of general conference.

The three-story, 70,000-square-foot edifice with a single attached central spire is located on a 15.39-acre tract at 1471 S. Geneva Road in Orem, just west of Interstate 15 and Utah Valley University. The First Presidency announced the temple site on Dec. 11, 2019, and released the exterior rendering on June 24, 2020.

It was the first of the eight to begin construction when Elder Craig C. Christensen, a General Authority Seventy and then president of the Utah Area, presided at the Sept. 5, 2020, groundbreaking ceremony.

It will be the third of its class of eight to be dedicated, with the Bentonville Arkansas and McAllen Texas temples scheduled for dedication later this fall.

The Provo-Ogden temple connection

In 1967, the First Presidency announced temples for Provo and Ogden — the first new temples in Utah in more than three-quarters of a century. At the time, 52% of all temple work worldwide was being done in three Utah temples: Salt Lake, Logan and Manti. Rather than enlarge the overcrowded temples, the Church opted to build two new ones.

To expedite and economize construction, the two were built under the same basic plan. The interior layout — six ordinance rooms encircling a center celestial room — allowed instruction in various languages in a single room, with a new instruction session able to start every 20 minutes. That design remains one of the Church’s most efficient for temples.

A little more than 50 years ago, the near-identical Ogden and Provo temples were dedicated — on Jan. 18, 1972, and Feb. 9, 1972, respectively. The two appeared nearly identical with modernist, contemporary designs of a single spire rising from a drum sporting Gothic-like arch designs.

In February 2010, the Church announced remodel plans for the Ogden Utah Temple, with the extreme exterior makeover resulting in a “temple classical” design and appearance. It closed April 2, 2011, nearly 40 years after its opening, for an extensive renovation lasting three and a half years before its Sept. 21, 2014, rededication.

Five decades after its dedication, the Provo Utah Temple remains one of the Church’s busiest locations —not just as Utah County’s first and longest-operating temple, but also with its proximity to both Brigham Young University and the Provo Missionary Training Center, with missionaries at the latter attending the temple weekly.

Temples in Utah

Attending a nearby temple for those living in the Provo Utah Temple district won’t be an extreme inconvenience of travel time or distance, with the Orem and Provo temples two of the Church’s seven houses of the Lord in Utah County and 28 total in the state of Utah.

At the time the Provo temple closes, Utah County will be home to five operating temples, the Orem Utah, Mount Timpanogos Utah, Payson Utah, Provo City Center and Saratoga Springs Utah temples, with the latter’s upcoming dedication scheduled for Aug. 13. Also, the Lindon Utah Temple has been under construction since its April 23, 2022, groundbreaking and will likely be completed and dedicated before the Provo Utah Temple reconstruction is finished.

Operating temples elsewhere in Utah — where the Church has 2.2 million members — are located in Bountiful, Brigham City, Draper, Logan, Monticello, Ogden, South Jordan (the Jordan River and Oquirrh Mountain temples) and Vernal.

Temples under construction in the state are in Ephraim, Heber Valley, Layton, Lindon, Smithfield, Syracuse, Taylorsville, Tooele (Deseret Peak) and Washington County (Red Cliffs).

Two pioneer-era temples — the Salt Lake and Manti Utah temples — are under renovation, with the St. George Utah Temple finished with its renovation and scheduled for a Dec. 10 rededication.

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