The initial exterior appearances of three temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — two in the United States and one in Europe, all still in planning and design — are now public.
The First Presidency has released the artistic renderings for the three houses of the Lord: the Lone Mountain Nevada Temple, the McKinney Texas Temple and the Birmingham England Temple.
Site locations for each of the three were released previously, two less than three months ago and the third in late 2022.
The exterior images were first published Monday, Feb. 26, on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
Additional information about the temples, including the announcement of each’s groundbreaking ceremony, will be released at future dates.
Lone Mountain Nevada Temple
President Russell M. Nelson announced the Lone Mountain temple — located in a neighborhood by the same name in northwestern Las Vegas — in October 2022 general conference, one of the 18 temple locations he listed in the conference’s Sunday afternoon closing session.
The location and general size descriptions were published Dec. 12, 2023, for what will be the second house of the Lord in the Las Vegas metro area.
The Lone Mountain Nevada Temple — planned for three stories and approximately 87,000 square feet — will be built on a 19.8-acre site southwest of Hickam Avenue between North Grand Canyon Drive and Tee Pee Lane in Las Vegas, Nevada. The major cross streets are West Craig Road to the north and West Alexander Road to the south.
The temple will be the state’s fourth, with the Las Vegas Nevada Temple dedicated and in operation since December 1989. The state’s two other temples are the Reno Nevada Temple, which was dedicated in 2000, and the Elko Nevada Temple, in construction since its May 2022 groundbreaking.
Nevada is home to more than 182,000 Latter-day Saints in over 360 congregations, with the first Church members arriving in the area in 1852.
McKinney Texas Temple
President Nelson had announced Prosper, Texas, as a location for a new house of the Lord, one of 18 announced Oct. 2, 2022, at the conclusion of the October 2022 general conference.
On Dec. 4, 2023, the First Presidency released both a name change — to the McKinney Texas Temple — and a site location for the announced house of the Lord in the north Dallas area of the state of Texas.
The McKinney temple is planned as a multistory edifice of approximately 44,000 square feet for the 8.16-acre site adjacent to an existing meetinghouse at 651 E. Stacy Road in Fairview, Texas. Fairview is a suburban area north of Dallas and south of McKinney.
It will be the third temple in Texas’ Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area, joining the Dallas and Fort Worth temples, the former operating since its 1984 dedication and the latter having its groundbreaking on Oct. 28, 2023.
Texas is home to seven other houses of the Lord. Besides the aforementioned ones in Dallas and Fort Worth, operating temples are located in San Antonio, Houston, Lubbock and McAllen, with one in planning for the state capital city of Austin.
More than 378,000 Latter-day Saints comprising nearly 750 congregations reside in Texas.
Missionaries first visited Texas in 1843. In 1898, about 300 Church members settled on land purchased by the Church in northeast Texas that would become the colony of Kelsey, about 110 miles east of Dallas.
Church membership in Texas has grown rapidly in recent decades — from 132,000 Latter-day Saints in 1985 to just over 210,000 in 2000 and now more than 378,000.
Membership in the Dallas-Fort Worth area alone is 83,000 strong.
Birmingham England Temple
The exterior rendering for the Birmingham England Temple comes a little more than two months after the site for the new house of the Lord was announced on Dec. 18, 2023.
Projected as a single-story edifice of approximately 10,800 square feet, the Birmingham England Temple will be built on a 2.7-acre site at 185-187 Penns Lane, Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, England, with patron housing and arrival facilities planned at the location. Currently, a meetinghouse sits at 185 Penns Lane, with the England Birmingham Mission office at 187 Penns Lane.
In the April 2022 general conference, President Nelson’s list of 17 new temples included a temple for “Birmingham, United Kingdom.” Four months later, the First Presidency announced that the temple there would be named the Birmingham England Temple, lining it up with the Church’s two dedicated and operating temples in Great Britain: the London England Temple (dedicated in 1958) and the Preston England Temple (1998).
The United Kingdom is home to nearly 187,000 Latter-day Saints comprising more than 315 congregations.
Two latter-day apostles — Heber C. Kimball and Orson Hyde — arrived in Liverpool, England and began preaching the restored gospel in Preston, England, about 95 miles (115 kilometers) northwest of Birmingham. During the 1800s, more than 52,000 converts emigrated from Britain to the United States to join the Church’s main body of membership; by 1870, nearly half of the population in the present-day state of Utah consisted of British immigrants.
