Nauvoo Temple Dedication Broadcast to Unprecedented Numbers of Latter-day Saints Worldwide
President Gordon B. Hinckley & his wife enter the Temple for the first dedication session.
NAUVOO — President Gordon B. Hinckley, world leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, will dedicate the newly rebuilt Nauvoo Illinois Temple on 27 June 2002, a historic and long-anticipated event that will recall the dedication of the original temple more than 156 years ago.
The dedication will be broadcast via satellite to approximately 2,300 locations in 72 countries, far exceeding the reach of any previous satellite broadcast by the Church. This will be the first temple dedication to be broadcast on an international scale.
The Nauvoo Illinois Temple is unlike any other the Church has constructed in recent years. It is built on the same site and to virtually the same exterior specifications and design as the original Nauvoo Temple.
"This is one of the most significant events in our 172-year history and a defining moment for us as a people," says Elder Donald L. Staheli, a general authority, or senior leader of the Church, and president of the Church's North America Central Area.
"Thousands of our members have ancestors who, at great personal sacrifice, built the original temple in the mid-1840s and drew strength from within its walls before making their 1,300-mile exodus from Nauvoo to the Rocky Mountains," Staheli says. "For members of the Church the world over, this is a time of remembering and rejoicing, knowing that the sacrifices of these early Latter-day Saints were not in vain."
More than 330,000 people — from every state in the United States and from 70 countries — have toured the Nauvoo Illinois Temple during the seven-week public open house from 6 May to 22 June. Visitors included prominent business and government leaders as well as officials from other religious faiths.
Formal dedicatory services for Church members will be conducted in 13 separate ticket-only sessions, beginning Thursday, 27 June, at 6 p.m. CDT, in order to accommodate as many Latter-day Saints as possible. Subsequent sessions will run through 30 June.
An expanded satellite system allows the Church to broadcast this dedication in areas of the world that have never before received any type of Church satellite broadcast. These areas include Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Armenia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia.
The first session and the last session will be broadcast live. Other broadcasts will be rebroadcasts of the first session.
Music for the dedication services will be provided by members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and local Latter-day Saint choirs.
Also on 27 June, at 8:30 a.m., President Hinckley and other general authorities of the Church will place a time capsule behind a dated coverstone outside the temple.
The Nauvoo Illinois Temple is the Church's 113th. It will be the primary temple used by more than 13,000 Latter-day Saints in western Illinois, eastern Iowa and northeastern Missouri, in stakes (similar to dioceses) in Nauvoo, Peoria, Cedar Rapids, Davenport and Iowa City.
On 4 April 1999, approximately 14 years after the Church dedicated a temple in Chicago, President Hinckley announced plans to rebuild the Nauvoo Temple. He told Latter-day Saints that the temple would be "a memorial to those who built the first such structure there on the banks of the Mississippi."
Architectural drawings of the original temple that surfaced in1948 provided much information on the exterior of the temple, with some interior details. Combining these renderings with an early daguerreotype of the temple and other meticulous research, a team of restoration architects and a research committee of historians and Nauvoo experts pieced together a reconstruction plan with remarkable attention to historic detail.