SALT LAKE CITY — The LDS Church's Jordan River Utah Temple will close Feb. 15 for extensive renovations that are expected to be completed by late 2017, the First Presidency announced Friday.
Combined with a separate Friday announcement that church leaders will break ground for two new temples on Oct. 17, the news added to a noteworthy year in LDS temple building.
A church press release said groundbreakings for both the Tucson Arizona Temple and Concepción Chile Temple will take place at 10 a.m. that day. The events aren't literally simultaneous because Concepción is four hours ahead of Tucson.
Concepción and Tucson will mark the third and fourth temple groundbreakings for the church this year, which is notable because The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in recent years had a growing inventory of temples under construction and temples that had been announced but not started.
Church President Thomas S. Monson stopped announcing new temples from April 2013 to April 2015 to allow the faith's temple department to focus on construction.
The moratorium appeared to be effective. The church's backlog of temples began to ease as staff addressed those under construction and others not yet begun. Church leaders dedicated a single temple in 2013 and three in 2014.
In 2015, they will dedicate five.
Three are now open — Córdoba Argentina, Payson Utah and Trujillo Peru. The open house for a fourth, the Indianapolis Indiana Temple, ends Saturday, and it is scheduled for dedication on Aug. 23.
A fifth new temple will be dedicated Dec. 13 in Tijuana, Mexico, and the church has announced a March 2016 dedication date for the new Provo City Center Temple.
The temple department began 2015 with five renovation projects, but it has announced rededication dates for three — Mexico City in September, Montreal in November and Suva Fiji in January.
That means church leaders will have dedicated or rededicated 10 temples from November 2014 to March 2016.
With that progress, the temple department was prepared to add the renovation of the Jordan River Temple and has begun to attack the list of announced temples for which no construction had been started.
Elder Craig C. Christensen of the church's Presidency of the Seventy and other church leaders broke ground on the Star Valley Wyoming Temple in April. Church leaders will break ground on the Cedar City Utah Temple on Saturday.
Concepción and Tucson will mark the third and fourth temple groundbreakings for the church this year after a single one in 2014.
The Jordan River Temple opened in 1981. It will be rededicated following the renovation. In the meantime, the three other temples in the Salt Lake Valley — Salt Lake, Draper and Oquirrh Mountain — are preparing to absorb the temple work and attendance of Latter-day Saints in the Jordan River Temple district.
President Monson announced the Concepción Chile Temple and four other temples in October 2009, so this fall's groundbreaking will come a full six years after its announcement. Of the other four temples announced along with Concepción, two are already open — Brigham City Utah and Fort Lauderdale Florida. Construction began on the other two in 2011 — Fortaleza Brazil and Sapporo Japan.
The Concepción temple, at 1525 Pedro de Valdivia in Concepción, will be the second in Chile. The church has had a temple operating in Santiago, Chile, since 1983.
The Tucson temple, on North Skyline Drive, will be the sixth in Arizona. The Mesa temple opened in 1927, followed by temples in Snowflake, Gila Valley and, in 2014, Gilbert and Phoenix.
With the progress on previously announced temples, President Monson in April announced the church will in the future build three more temples, in Abidjan, Ivory Coast; Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Bangkok, Thailand.
The LDS Church has 147 operating temples around the world, with 12 more under construction and 14 announced but not yet begun.
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