Springfield’s Latter-day Saints members eagerly await temple

Excitement is building for local members as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prepares to build a temple in the Springfield metro area.

Although meeting houses – sites of Sunday worship for church members – are common, temples are rare, and the Springfield temple will be only the third in the Show Me State when it opens at an unannounced date just south of Springfield.

Members of the Latter-day Saints faith must travel to temples for certain religious practices, but currently, the closest temple to Springfield is the one dedicated in September 2023 in Bentonville, Arkansas. There are also locations in Kansas City and St. Louis.

The Springfield temple is planned for a 38-acre site located south of James River Freeway and west of U.S. Route 65, near Mercy Orthopedic Hospital Springfield.

The cost of construction for the 29,000-square-foot structure that is planned has not been announced.

Devon Jarvis is president of the Springfield stake, which includes 11 churches. He said approximately five stakes, or 20,000 church members, occupy the area to be served by the Springfield temple.

He added there are roughly 10,000 church members in the Springfield metro area.

Jarvis, who grew up in Springfield, remembers when he was a child, and the closest temples were in Dallas and Chicago.

“Historically, they were spaced out based on need and the means to build them,” he said. “Now they’re building them pretty quickly in different places all over the world.”

The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the church has a $100 billion investment portfolio, which it is using to build temples across the globe.

Church buildings go where the people are, and Jarvis said southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas are the two fastest-growing areas for the church in the southwestern region of the country.

Jarvis, an optometrist who owns Jarvis Family Eye Center LLC in Willard, fulfils his church role as a volunteer. Congregations – called wards – are also led by volunteer bishops, according to the Latter-day Saints website.

Mike Stennett is bishop of the Ingram Mill Ward in Springfield, and the new temple is going to be built within the boundaries of his ward.

“It’s just an exciting time for us,” he said. “In this area, we’ve had to travel to be able to enjoy the temple. Now that one is being built here, people will come to the area to go to the temple with us. It will be a wonderful thing.”

Temple location
Although the church website refers to the planned building as the Springfield temple, its address, 2720 E. Farm Road 188, is technically in Ozark.

The site was revealed in a June news release from the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, following an April 2023 announcement by President Russell M. Nelson of the intention to build a temple in Springfield, following the dedication of the St. Louis temple in 1997 and the Kansas City temple in 2012. There are 75,000 church members and 160 congregations in the Show Me State.

The growth of the Latter-day Saints church in Missouri comes nearly two centuries after a fractious start for the faithful in the state. Church founder Joseph Smith invited the faithful to gather in Independence in 1831 – a decade after statehood – to witness the second coming of Jesus Christ. Large numbers of church members migrated to the new state, but within a decade, most Missouri church members left the state after being targeted for attacks by non-Mormons, including Missouri Gov. Lilburn Boggs, who authorized their expulsion and even their extermination. The events are described in “The Missouri Mormon War” section of the Missouri Digital Heritage website of the Missouri Secretary of State’s office.

A groundbreaking date and construction schedule have not been released for the 29,000-square-foot building, and a rendering has not been shared.

By tradition, the temple is expected to host a multiweek open house and will be open to the public to visit and tour after its completion and before its dedication ceremony. However, temples are regarded as holy sites by the members of the faith, and following the dedication, only church members are permitted inside.

The temple is the site of religious ceremonies, called ordinances, including baptism and confirmation and proxy baptism, which is the practice of baptizing family members and others who have died.

Specific to the faith are sealing ceremonies, which honor connections among family members, such as marriage, that connect them eternally to one another and the church, and endowment ceremonies, where members promise to uphold specific church covenants.

Local significance
When the Bentonville temple held its open house last fall, Springfield Mayor Ken McClure, with more than a dozen other local community leaders, made the trek south to visit it.

“The announcement had been made in April 2023 that Springfield was on the list to get a temple,” McClure said. “I wanted to see the new temple in Bentonville to get a feel for what it would look like and understand what was inside.”

McClure called his sojourn a worthwhile trip.

“The LDS church has grown dramatically in this region, and a temple is a strong attraction for members of that faith,” he said.

McClure said he thinks the temple will be a tremendous asset to the city and the region.

“We have a very diverse faith community here,” he said.

Statistics from the Association of Religious Data Archives, dating from 2020, show 51% of the 475,000 people in the Springfield metro area identify as belonging to a religious group. Of these, 43.7% identify as evangelical or mainline Protestant, 4.4% as Catholic and 1.7% as LDS. There were 672 congregations from among all faiths, according to that survey, which counted 16 LDS congregations numbering 8,022 adherents.

Jarvis said the Latter-day Saints church numbers are growing. In the year after the temple was announced, he figures about 500 church members had moved into his 11-ward stake, which includes most of Springfield, Marshfield, Buffalo, Bolivar, Willard and Rogersville and surrounding areas. Anecdotal accounts have about the same number moving to the 13-ward stake just south of his, which covers south Springfield, Ozark, Nixa and all the way south to Harrison, Arkansas.

Jarvis said it was hard to differentiate among members moving from out of state or just across town, but his guess is that the temple announcement is playing a part in the influx.

“We have seen many members moving into the area for various reasons, proximity to the temple being one of those reasons,” he said.

Excitement growing
Fernanda Edwards was born and raised in Brazil but has been in Springfield since 2009, and she has the volunteer role of counselor for the Springfield stake, helping individual communities with their children’s programs.

“I always had a goal to go to the temple once a month – that would be the track I would do,” she said. “Me and my husband would go to the St. Louis temple every month.”

Sometimes that entailed a hotel stay and restaurant visits, she said, noting there was frequently too much she needed to do in one day.

“Really, always my main goal was to worship Jesus Christ in a more intimate way – to ponder the challenges of my life and ask for heaven’s help into my life to help me,” she said.

Her secondary goal, she said, was to help others, doing what she called proxy work for her ancestors or for other people who had submitted names. By proxy work, she mainly referred to the act of performing the baptism ordinance for those who have died.

She said when she learned a temple would be built in Springfield, she felt blessed.

“It caught me so off guard,” she said. “I just felt such overwhelming joy and happiness. I really try to center my life around the temple. To have this blessing in Springfield, a 20-minute drive – there’s nothing that beats that. It’s so special to me.”

Edwards lives in Willard, and she said she has met many new people who have moved to the community in the past year. Some people will only move to a place that has a temple, she said.

“It’s been great to meet people and welcome them into the community,” she said. “The temple is important to everyone that is a member of the church.”

According to the church website, there are 335 temples, including 189 that are dedicated, seven that are scheduled for dedication, 45 under construction, one scheduled for a groundbreaking, 53 with published site locations and 40 announced but without sites. Of these, 153, or 46%, have been announced during the six-year presidency of Nelson.