The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced the dedication and open house dates for the San Pedro Sula Honduras Temple.
Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles will dedicate the San Pedro Sula Honduras Temple — the second house of the Lord in the Central American nation — on Sunday, Oct. 13. The two sessions — scheduled for 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. local time — will be broadcast to all units throughout the temple district.
Prior to the dedication, a public open house is planned to run from Thursday, Sept. 12, through Saturday, Sept. 28, excluding Sundays. A media day will be held on Monday, Sept. 9, with invited guests touring the Tuesday and Wednesday, Sept. 10 and 11.
The dates were first published on Tuesday, May 28, on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
President Russell M. Nelson announced a temple for San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on April 5, 2019, one of eight locations for new temples the Prophet identified at the close of the April 2019 general conference.
The groundbreaking for the San Pedro Sula Honduras Temple was held Saturday, Sept. 5, 2020, during the first year of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Attendance was limited to the simple yet sacred ceremony, which was livestreamed to members throughout the area. Elder José Bernardo Hernández, an Area Seventy and San Pedro Sula native, was assigned to give brief remarks and offer a prayer dedicating the site and construction process for the house of the Lord.
An exterior rendering of the temple was released in August 2020, when the First Presidency announced the groundbreaking for the next month.
The temple in San Pedro Sula — located in northwest Honduras, less than 30 miles from the coastline to the Gulf of Honduras and Caribbean Sea — will be the second house of the Lord in the country. The Tegucigalpa Honduras Temple — in the capital city in the south-central region of the nation — was dedicated in 2013.
For several decades, Latter-day Saints in Tegucigalpa traveled roughly 400 miles to the temple in Guatemala City. The completion of the Tegucigalpa temple cut the travel time in half for many members outside of Tegucigalpa, so ward or stake temple trips could be planned for just one day. Because of savings in time and bus fare, the cost was cut by 90 percent. With the temple in San Pedro Sula, it will be reduced even more.
The San Pedro Sula Honduras Temple will serve Latter-day Saints in the Atlántida, Bay Islands, Colón, Copán, Cortés, Lempira, Ocotepeque and Santa Bárbara departments of Honduras.
Missionaries first arrived in Honduras in December 1952, with the first converts baptized and the first congregation organized in March 1953. Church membership in Honduras has grown rapidly in the past 45 years, from 6,300 Latter-day Saints in 1980 to more than 187,000 in nearly 240 congregations today.
