Our Provo Temple

     Trying to learn more about temples, I have been reading a couple of volumes from Hugh Nibley on the subject of temples (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley Volumes 12 and 17 Ancient History), and found these insightful personal references to the Provo Temple:
     “We strive to make our temples beautiful, but if in the eyes of many of us some turn out to something less than breathtaking, that doesn’t dampen our enthusiasm for what goes on in them.  My favorite temple is certainly the Provo temple, though as a building I give it very low marks indeed.  We are not attached to the building as such (it is but an endowment house)....
     “...we know that the gospel has been restored, and the temple is the center of things.  So we must repair there often.  I have gotten so I am almost an addict.  I cannot keep away from the temple.  I revel in it, the building I call an endowment house, lacking as it does in so many respects–but that doesn’t make any difference.  We can see the ordinances and the endowments.  It was built for practical purposes.
     “In a speech in the 1880s in St. George, Brother Erastus Snow said that every temple has a slightly different design, because it performs a different purposes.  The St. George Temple was built after the pattern of the Kirtland Temple, to emphasize certain things.  Our Provo Temple is built in a different way entirely.  It functions with a different thing in mind–efficiency in getting a lot of work done in a hurry, but also as a teaching tool.” (Vol. 12, “The Meaning of the Temple,” pp. 32, 35)
     Truly the Provo temple is a work-horse temple, built for high volume, like a well-oiled machine.  We like to think that it also retains the same spiritual values that smaller-volume temples have.  President Dahl, 1st Counselor in the temple presidency, has likened our work to a duck, with legs paddling furiously under the water, but with the water on the surface being perfectly calm with no evidence of the effort of the bird to propel itself along.
     Wendy and I have been ordinance workers in the Provo temple since 2006 and 2005 respectively and love this place.  We love the Spirit there.  It has been a House of Learning for us, in the deeper things of the gospel.  We love the friendships we have made.  We love the chance to serve the MTC missionaries who pour into the temple daily, and initiate them into the temple ordinances.  We love the association with college students who make up a significant minority of the temple worker staff (we must have the lowest average worker age of about any temple in the world) and project that these young people, as they graduate and establish employment and families in many other parts of the world, will be a great strength to the Kingdom.  We love the challenges of providing an orderly and spiritual tone in this high volume setting.  We understand that our temple completed about 3 million ordinances in 2012, being the highest volume temple in the world, and we hope to keep that record.
     We are proud of the vision and leadership exhibited by our temple presidency in the face of recent changes in the endowment film, which added about 12 minutes to its length.  They challenged us to maintain the schedule that has been in place for over 40 years, in which a new endowment session starts every 20 minutes, from 7 am or earlier to about 8 pm each day.  We have 6 endowment rooms, with a complete rotation every 2 hours.  This now means that, for all day and every day, we need to start all sessions on time and clear each room in 10–12 minutes, so the same room may then be loaded with the next set of patrons and start on time. 
     We understand that we are the only large film temple in the world that has been able to maintain its old regular schedule in light of the new film length.  President Daines reported that when the new film was presented in August, that members of the Church’s Temple Committee suggested that the temple might want to change to a 30 minute schedule.  However, members of the presidency felt that we should make the attempt to continue to accommodate the high volume of patrons who use the temple and keep the original schedule.  So far, this has worked.