Saturday, March 13, 2021

Second Baptistry Announced for Salt Lake Temple

In an unprecedented move, the Church announced yesterday that the renovated Salt Lake Temple will include a second baptistry in order to provide "greater capacity and more temple ordinances." This is a major development as the Church has never had two baptistries within the same temple. Significant increases in youth engaging in temple ordinance work, combined with unprecedented numbers of family-file names for temple work, appear likely contributors for this major announcement. This decision may play a role in the decision to include two baptistries in temples perceived as highly utilized by local membership, specifically in the Wasatch Front in Utah or other major urban areas with significant Latter-day Saint populations in the Inter-mountain West. The original article that details the announcement can be found here.

9 comments:

miro said...

Where is the post for the february Newsletter?

I saw the newsletter at cumorah.org so it's available.

Eric S. said...

I have started to wonder if potentially one of the considerations for new temples, particularly in places like Utah, is due in part to the increased number of youth attending for baptisms at existing temples.

I know the baptistry at Jordan River, for example, was kept very busy from early morning to late evening most days even well before Salt Lake closed for renovation and I'm sure there was a similar story at many other temples before the pandemic.

This is big and exciting news, almost like announcing a new temple within and existing temple!

Also big news with Manti renovation starting later this year. I wonder how long after until Logan will begin renovation. I suspect they are probably spacing it out a bit, so perhaps in 2022.

Jim Anderson said...

What happened is almost like they had announced a second temple for Salt Lake, as it was said in the announcement that it would 'more than double' the overall capacity of the temple without having to build a second temple.

At times, including other areas of the temple, there will easily be over 1,000 patrons and workers simultaneously doing work and a few doing other duties. It will likely require in excess of 5,000 workers to staff the temple during any given week. There is a paradigm shift in our thinking about temple attendance, whereas the old way was 'once a month', it is now, 'attend whenever and wherever circumstances permit', which has been made much easier by many conveniences in ways we do a wide range of things we do every day and in what we use to do them. .

The temple district will be smaller also when the temple reopens, as Deseret Peak and Taylorsville will be operating by then, and both will take some from the area covered by Salt Lake before the closure. It is also possible an additional temple or two might be announced in the Salt Lake Valley, and if it is situated in a way it takes some from a potential post-reopening temple district, that will impact things.

In the year since the pandemic started, and they made the announcement on the anniversary of 'the crash' where everything went down and we are only now beginning to really 'thaw' some of the bigger things. Since 2016 the Church has not had to use extracted names at any operating temple, and the last year has meant the backlog has grown at a faster pce than before. Tens of millions of names have likely been submitted for ordinances, others that had something done and then fell through the cracks in the reservation system have also been put back on the waiting list. Recent changes in FamilySearch ensure that once submitted now, the names will not fall off in the way they did, and help everyone find and pick off these names, so many more members can take names when they go versus the name slips the temple has, some of those will still be seen.

Baptisms in many areas have also not really let up, in one Philippines mission, the first two months saw more baptisms with 1/2 the missionaries they had at the same time last year as the foreign missionaries still have not been able to return there. Many of those there and in other missions will start attending temples when they reopen, so this will only grow faster.

John Pack Lambert said...

One thing to keep in mind is that with the Salt Lake Temple doing the endowment by film after reopening it will be easier for non-English speakers to participate in the endowment there. This in turn may make it more likely that visitors to Salt Lake City will plan to attend that temple. That factor alone may necessitate a 6th temple in Salt Lake Valley.

Johnathan Reese Whiting said...

I attended a youth baptism trip to the Ogden Temple a couple of years ago, whereat the temple president commented on how he wished we could all petition the leadership in SLC for a second baptistry for Ogden (due to the long wait we had to go through that day and the number of Ordinances they daily perform). Looks like he was ahead of his time. I'm eager to see which temples might have a second baptistry announced next.

Jim Anderson said...

The volume of baptistry activity is one reason that when you share a name you find with the temple, female names get picked up by temples within days, and male names also at times as those will take longer.

Some other things will happen after everyone goes Phase 4 wherein all submissions go into the same pot, and what you submit may be completed in five or even six temples. Mine does baptisms, then the confirmations come a week or two later.

Johnathan Reese Whiting said...

@JPL That's a good point.

Johnathan Reese Whiting said...

If Chris happens to be reading this...

Did you happen to make a new Temple Bracket Dropbox File to share for this upcoming April Conference. I always look forward to that. :)

John Pack Lambert said...

Ogden is having 2 new temples built that will take away from its demand. Still I can see benefits to multiple baptistries, especially with the extremely late Monsonian reforms that made it so you need even fewer endowed adults to do baptisms, and with the Monsonian and Nelsonian push for family groups to come and use baptistries, not just ward youth groups.

I am still really hoping though for a second Weber County Temple. A second Cache county temple as well.