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By Scott Taylor, David Schneider, Church News
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has 214 dedicated temples. Adding in houses of the Lord under construction or announced and in planning stages brings the number to 383.
One visible aspect of the Church becoming a vibrant, growing and increasingly international faith is the number and spread of temples worldwide. What started from the four pioneer-era houses of the Lord in Salt Lake City and the present-day state of Utah at the end of the 19th century to an initial expansion across the United States and into western Canada then led to the start of temples being built in international locations in the 1950s.
By 1981, the Church had 20 dedicated and operating temples — nearly evenly spaced throughout Utah, in the United States and in international locations. The 20 included seven in Utah, seven elsewhere across the U.S. and six outside the U.S. — in Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand, England, Brazil and Japan.
Over the next 15 years — leading to 1996, when the membership majority shifted from the U.S. to international — the Church added 27 more temples. The 17 new temples outside the United States included the first in Africa and the first two in Mexico and Central America, with houses of the Lord by 1996 across all the inhabited continents.
Following is a list of the first temples in intercontinental areas — with their current names — and their years of dedication and start of operations:
- Canada: Cardston Alberta Temple, 1923
- Europe: Bern Switzerland Temple, 1955
- Pacific: Hamilton New Zealand Temple, 1958
- South America: São Paulo Brazil Temple, 1978
- Asia: Tokyo Japan Temple, 1980
- Mexico / Central America: Mexico City Mexico Temple, 1983
- Africa: Johannesburg South Africa Temple, 1985
Of note: One could say that the Laie Hawaii Temple was Church’s first Pacific-area temple, since its 1919 dedication date came four decades before the U.S. territory became a state in 1959. But for this accounting, it is considered today as a U.S. temple.
Of the 47 houses of the Lord in 1996, eight were in Utah and 16 in other states for a U.S. total of 24, with 23 outside the United States. And several times during that stretch between 1981 and 1996, international temples outnumbered temples in the United States — the first time happening in late 1985 and early 1986, when the dedication of the Seoul Korea, Lima Peru and Buenos Aires Argentina temples resulted in three more international temples than U.S. ones at that time.
At the start of 1996, when the Church’s membership majority had shifted from being U.S.-centric to international, the balance of temple totals was already following suit — first frequently teeter-tottering between more U.S. temples and more international temples from the 1980s well into the 2000s.
The Church experienced its last and likely final switch to a majority of international temples came around during the COVID-19 era — when dedications in 2019, 2020 and 2021 of the Fortaleza Brazil, Port-au-Prince Haiti, Lisbon Portugal, Arequipa Peru, Durban South Africa and Winnipeg Manitoba temples pushed the count to plus-five in favor of international temples and a majority that hasn’t been relinquished since.
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Currently, the Church of Jesus Christ has a total of 214 dedicated houses of the Lord — 103 in the United States and 111 in other countries and U.S. territories, with four more scheduled for dedication in the U.S. and three more internationally.
Looking to the future, the majority of international temples compared to those in the U.S. is projected to widen substantially. Of the 61 temples currently under construction or scheduled for groundbreaking, 42 — or 69% — are being built in countries and territories outside the United States.
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