Over 60,000 Visitors Toured New Moses Lake Washington Temple During Its Open House
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News Story by Cassy Benefield | FāVS News
About 63,000 people made their way through the new Moses Lake Washington Temple open house by the time it ended Aug. 19.
Whenever a new temple is built in a city or when a temple receives a significant renovation, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and local members will host about a two-week-long open house where anyone can tour the inside.
While exact numbers are hard to come by, temple open house coordinator Michael Christensen thinks Church members made up 50-60% of the visitors with non-members making up 40-50%.
Susan Mann and her husband and son were part of the non-members statistic.
They said they decided to visit the temple because they lived Moses Lake and thought it was too good an opportunity to pass up. As a military family, they have lived overseas in places like Germany and Japan, where they loved experiencing those cultures, she said.
“[We’ve] been through Shinto shrines and churches and cathedrals all over the globe,” Mann said. “And I was like, this is right in our backyard, and we should take the opportunity to see a beautiful building that’s just been brought to our community.”
Not all visitors came from the neighborhood though.
Coleen Bates and her three daughters — ages 13, 16 and 19 — visited the Temple as Latter-day Saints. They drove nearly 250 miles from Kelowna, British Columbia, in Canada, to visit the temple.
The drive wasn’t that much of a hardship, they said, as their closest temple is a four and a half hour drive from their home. Still, Bates said she felt like she was in another country.
Because every temple is different, she said it was an experience for her to see what made the Moses Lake ‘House of the Lord’ unique. Commissioned paintings of local landscapes line the walls, and apple, cherry, potato and alfalfa blossoms — representing the local agriculture — adorn many details throughout the building.
But the decorations and the temple’s uniqueness were not the only draw for Bates and her children.
Because many of the ordinances done in the temple come when members are adults, children don’t get to see the whole interior. For instance, they don’t get to experience the Sealing Room because that’s for when members get eternally sealed to their partners.
They don’t get to experience the special Bridal Room, with its chandeliers made of blown glass from Italy or its carpets that are beautifully carved with intricate details after they’ve been laid.
They also don’t get to experience the Celestial Room, what members consider to be the place on earth that’s the most like heaven.
For Bates, the whole drive and the visit to the temple felt very precious.
“It was precious to be just surrounded by beauty,” Bates said. “And the purpose is that it will be a house of the Lord, this sacred edifice that we get to serve in, but also that we have the opportunity to feel closer to God. It was wonderful to be here with my girls.”
Now that the open house has ended, the temple will be dedicated on Sept. 17.
Christensen knows many think that in the time between the last day of the open house and the dedication, all the carpets, and maybe even some of the furnishings, will need to be replaced in order to purify the temple.
But he says that’s not true.
“Even amongst our own members, you’ll hear that and so who knows where rumors get started,” he said.
Carpets, however, may be cleaned and loose tiles maybe reset due to all the foot traffic, but the temple remains the same after the dedication as it was during the open house, Christensen said.
Once dedicated, the temple can only be visited by members who come with a temple recommend, a note from a local ecclesiastical leader usually called the bishop.
“We get that recommend by going through something of an interview,” said Scott Robinson, a Church public affairs representative who gave the media tours.
Questions include: are they members of the Church; do they believe in God, the eternal Father, and his son, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost; and do they consider themselves worthy to worship in the house of the Lord, he added.
“Really it’s a self-evaluation for us to say, I know I’m not perfect, but I feel like I’m living the standards of commandments of the Church well enough that I can go in and worship him,” Robinson said.
This temple is the 181st operating temple in the world, and one of 315 temples currently dedicated (or about to be dedicated), under construction and announced.
Russell M. Nelson, the 17th president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is known by followers as the president who has announced more temples to be built than any other before him. Since 2018, he has announced 133 temples, which make up 42% of all Church temples.
The church is building more and more temples because they want people to be able to attend and not to have to spend so much time and money traveling to do so. Not only that, the more temples there are, the more often members can worship there.
“We kind of are standing on the shoulders of our heritage,” Christensen said. “So, my parents, those first settlers, that came that were members of the Church, they were very temple focused.”
But his parents were only able to attend a couple times a year, while he can drive just 30 minutes.
“I think the important thing is to remember that our temple worship should make us better people. We should be better citizens, we should be better husbands, fathers, mothers, sisters,” Christensen said. “I think that benefits not only members of the church, but members of the communities that we reside in.”
