I have enjoyed reading through the hundreds of comments regarding temple predictions for this coming October General Conference. Something that has been apparent to me as I have reviewed recent temple announcements and the comments for my previous blog post is that the Church has placed an emphasis on building more temples in remote areas of the world or in places where there are comparatively few members regardless of recent growth trends since 2018. My traditional method to predict and identify likely temple sites has primarily been based on factors that have appeared most correlated with previous temple announcements in the past 20 years from approximately 2001 to 2017. However, it appears that it may be appropriate to provide two top 10 lists to better account for this recent change in temple announcement trends - one that uses the traditional method to identify likely locations to have a temple announced (i.e., number of stakes, age of the oldest stake, rate of church growth, proximity to the nearest temple, level of usage of the nearest temple by temple patrons) and another that predicts new temple locations based on other criteria (i.e., distance to the nearest temple, duration of a church presence in the location, at least one stake). Thus, I have provided my top 10 list for likely locations for new temple announcements based upon the latter criteria. These temples would be small temples given the small size of the Church and slow rate of growth in the area that each potential temple would serve:
- Glasgow, Scotland
- Tirana, Albania
- Hobart, Australia
- Christchurch, New Zealand
- Kingston, Jamaica
- Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
- Fairbanks, Alaska
- Augusta, Maine
- Rapid City, South Dakota
- Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain
