I’ve heard anecdotally in discussion on Facebook that people attending the temple since the changes in ordinances that came to light last week have found it much more crowded than usual. This seems like it shouldn’t be too surprising. That changes were coming was rumored at least in December, and I’m usually not the most plugged in to such things, so if I heard rumors in December, other people probably did long before that. Given the typical sameness of the temple from one visit to the next, people might be extra interested to go to see when they know it will be different. Add to that the fact that the changes may make the temple more palatable for feminists and other egalitarian-minded folks (although many also understandably feel deeply ambivalent about them), and a whole swath of people who might be on the fringes of temple attendance might want to return.
But of course what I’d love to have is some hard data to see if I can find evidence that this is really happening. Of course I don’t have actual temple attendance data, but what I do have that might serve as a very rough proxy is counts of the number of endowment sessions in each temple. I got these by looking at the individual temple pages on the Church’s site, all linked from this page that lists all the temples. Counts of sessions aren’t as good as counts of temple patrons, but the reality is that there’s zero chance that I’ll ever get anything like that, so I’ll just be happy with what I do have. Even more fortunately, I started taking monthly samples of endowment session counts in the middle of last year, so I have a little bit of past data to compare to. I haven’t counted all sessions for every day in each month, but what I have done is pick two days in each month–always a Saturday and the following Tuesday near the middle of the month–and count sessions on those days. (I chose Saturday and Tuesday because they’re the beginning and end of the temple week.)
This graph shows the total number of endowment sessions across all temples on the two sampled days for each month from April of last year to this month. (Note that the sampled days for this month haven’t even occurred yet; I’ve tried to take session counts in the week before the sampled days so I can get the most up-to-date information if the folks at the temple decide to make a late addition or deletion of a session.)
The total number of sessions looks pretty flat across time. It looks like January has a little dip from December rather than an increase. So, no evidence for the idea that temples are busier?
Not so fast! The situation is complicated by the fact that the totals are not coming from a constant set of temples. New temples open. Old temples are closed for renovation and then re-open later. Every temple (I think) is closed periodically for a few weeks at a time. This last issue means that I couldn’t just solve the problem by showing counts only for the set of temples that were open constantly through the entire period.
Here’s what I did, then, to untangle the data. For each monthly change in count of endowment sessions, I attributed it to one of three causes:
- Construction/renovation — A new temple opens, an old temple closes for renovation, or a renovated temple re-opens.
- Periodic temporary closure (typically of several weeks) or reopening after such a closure
- Change in number of sessions offered for a temple open at both times
For purposes of this analysis, it’s only the third category that is of interest. The first two are just the background noise we have to get past.
Here’s a graph showing the breakdown of each monthly change by these three categories.
The numbers in this graph are just a breakdown of the changes in the first graph. For example, in the first graph, the total count increases from 2197 to 2339 between April and May of last year. In the second graph, that difference of 142 (2339-2197) is broken down into 134 resulting from temples temporarily closing or re-opening and 8 net sessions added in temples that were open in both April and May. Looking across to the next month, you can see that sometimes the categories go in opposite directions. The 56 session increase from May to June breaks down into a gain of 4 for construction or renovation (this was due to just two temples: Jordan River Utah reopened for a gain of 62 sessions; Mesa Arizona closed for a loss of 58 sessions), a gain of 69 for temporary closure/re-opening, but a loss of 17 sessions in temples that were open in both May and June.
The story of interest here is in January. Even though the overall movement is a decline for the month, as you can see in the first graph, the number of sessions added in temples open in both December and January is 42, by far the largest month-over-month change for this category in the data. (The overall number for the month is only negative because of more sessions are lost to temporary closure.) This is larger in absolute value than the next two largest monthly changes in session counts in open temples combined (-18 in September; -17 in June).
I’d say this result is at least tentatively supportive of the possibility that people are attending the temple more since the changes. Of course, given that I’m counting sessions for days less than two weeks after the temples even began implementing the changes, it could very well be that this increase reflects an anticipated change by temple workers who expect more patrons rather than by actual demand. But it could be a reflection of demand too. I don’t have a good sense of how quickly temples can add or subtract sessions, but I’m guessing it probably doesn’t take too long.
Another possible explanation for this result is that people routinely make New Year’s resolutions to go to the temple more, so temples always schedule more endowment sessions in January, kind of like how gyms are famously busiest in January. It’s unfortunate that I don’t have endowment session counts going further back in time so I can test this. Sadly, the session lists are no longer available on the lds.org pages once the dates are in the past, as the pages are clearly designed with temple patrons in mind rather than data-hungry oddballs.
In any case, as imperfect and incomplete as the data I have are, I plan to continue sampling endowment session counts so I can hopefully get a sense of whether this uptick in endowment sessions can be attributed to the ordinance changes, and if so, how robust it will be over time. I’ll come back to this topic in the future if I find something else interesting to report.
I’m wondering if increased attendance affects some temples differently than others. Some temples such as Provo, have sessions every 20 minutes from dawn until late evening, and couldn’t possibly add any more without running through the night. The new shorter session might allow starting more frequently, but the limiting factor is probably the number of endowment rooms. Even if you start a little more often than 20 minutes, pretty soon, you have all the rooms in use, and you’d have to wait until a room opens up.
Some other large temples might be able to add additional sessions if they have times that haven’t been scheduled. But if you do too much of that, you’d have to get more people to staff the temple than you have temple workers called.
A lot of small temples have just two or three sessions a day, and a few more on Saturday. In my experience, some sessions have lots of empty seats, unless people are there for some event. You can easily find time to schedule more sessions but again, staffing the temple for more hours with the same number of workers is an issue. I suspect that some small temples can absorb increased attendance for some sessions without having to add sessions to the schedule.
I wouldn’t necessarily expect that overall, the number of sessions would increase so quickly as to reflect increased attendance in the last two weeks. My general sense is that the temple schedule doesn’t change too often. They print cards with the schedule, and that’s usually good for a year, though some temples would be able to add an additional session on the fly if they have a backlog of patrons on a particular day. Another complication is that some temples that have added sessions may have done so because of nearby temples closing for renovation, rather than because of short-term attendance increases. I know you looked at sessions increasing and decreasing as temples open and close, but I’m not sure if you considered the effect of a nearby temple closing.
The attempts at estimation described above brought to mind a blog comment of mine from a decade ago: “I just got off the phone with the recorder of the Washington, D.C. temple. I wanted to learn how many ordinances are performed there each year, but he couldn’t tell me. I mentioned that when I attended the Provo temple [circa 1989] there was a tally near the entrance of the month’s work, and the recorder said that there is a concern about temple work not becoming a competitive numbers game, such as baptizers trying to set a personal best for most done in an hour. No data, alas, but a pleasant conversation.”
At that time I found that the last reporting of temple ordinance statistics in General Conference was a 1986 report of the totals for 1985.
One more note about temple attendance: My local temple (Baton Rouge) is closed for remodeling. I recently called the next closest temple (Birmingham) to try to make an appointment for next week. I figured I should call well in advance in case they were overbooked. Birmingham told me that they no longer require reservations for endowments, and that I should just show up, and they recommended that I come early. I don’t know if that’s specific to Birmingham, or if all small temples have done away with reservations. I didn’t ask if that was new for this year, or if that has been their policy for awhile. I know that B.R. still took reservations until they closed earlier this year. There have been times when they had to bring in chairs to accommodate everyone, but I don’t remember ever being turned away for a reservation in any small temples because the session was full. Maybe they decided that reservations just weren’t necessary, even with the current surge.
John, your comment reminded me of a few years ago when I went on a youth baptismal trip. My then-bishop said that last time, he had been told that we were just two baptisms short of the record. [That seems unlikely for any number of reasons. Perhaps the ward had done quite a few, and someone in the temple commented on it by making a tongue-in-cheek comment.] The bishop really, really wanted to go for the record this time. He kept grilling the presidency member about what the record was. “Um… we don’t really keep track of that.”
For the anecdote file:
I’m friends with a couple who live in Iowa and went to a Friday the 4th 10:00 a.m. session in the Winter Quarters session. The room was packed, and workers had to bring out at least a dozen folding chairs, which they understood to be unusual for a weekday session.
The next day, Saturday the 5th, I resolved to attend the Chicago temple (following an early dentist appointment). I mentioned this to a couple elsewhere in the stake I’m friends with, and they too were planning on a Saturday morning session, so we agreed to go together. We were all worried about being able to get in, so we arrived earlier than we would normally do. As we pulled in to the parking lot, it was definitely fuller than normal, so we were a little anxious about getting in to our 11:00 a.m. session. But we needn’t have worried. Our session was fullish, but there were still empty seats, no folding chairs requires. I would say it was pretty typical for a Saturday morning at that temple. (We theorized the extra full parking lot may be due to weddings.) And when we got out (approaching 1:00 p.m., the place seemed dead, even though sessions run until 3:00 p.m.
My theory is that a lot of Saints still don’t know about the changes. The notice on the Newsroom was really fague (intentionally), and the little video at the beginning tells people not to talk about the changes (er, uh, “adjustments”) or even that there are changes. Folks like us that are connected of course all know, but your average member may well still be in the dark and it may take time for an awareness of these changes to filter out to everyone..
I’d also wondered about that because here in Utah things have been busy! Jordan River upped their endowment schedule to every 20 minutes (it had been on the half hour in 2018), and the couple times I’ve been this week there are lines out the door of the women’s dressing room and no parking to be had. And this is a big temple with high capacity rooms (I think the endowment rooms seat 150). My dad is a stake president in downtown Salt Lake, and said he’s had interviews for twenty temple recommends last week (from people with lapsed recommends who want to return).
Also anecdotal: I’m a temple worker on a Wednesday afternoon shift. Our sessions were fuller than normal last week, but not overly full (we had 12-16 sisters on each session, when we normally average 6-8. Afternoons are the most quiet time of the day in our temple. Sorry, I’m not usually aware of the numbers of brothers as I am female). The morning shift, however, had to add three additional sessions to accomodate all the patrons who wanted to attend, including one session that filled 80% of the total seats just with sisters. However, this was also the week before we closed for cleaning, so we normally see additional attendance as a result. I would say our higher numbers were a combined result of the week before closure (35%) and people attending because of the changes (60%), and maybe new years resolutions (5%), but that’s just me guessing based on past years.
It’s those spontaneous extra sessions that your data doesn’t account for, although I know exactly how hard it is to get actual attendance numbers, and I applaud you working with what you have available.
Thanks for your comments, everyone. Left Field, that’s a great point about some temples being run already at pretty near the limit of what they can handle. I wonder if even temples like Provo, though, if like you said they bumped up from 3/hour to 4/hour, could add quite a few new sessions if they wanted or needed to. And of course I guess if they were really unable to, it seems likely that more sessions could be added at another nearby temple (Provo City Center?) to accommodate the demand. I definitely saw that in the data I gathered, with Oquirrh Mountain (I think) dropping a number of sessions when Jordan River opened back up, suggesting that the extra sessions had been added in the first place to take up the slack for the closed temple. In any case, you’re right that I should definitely look at endowment room count by temple at some point.
John Mansfield, that makes total sense that they wouldn’t want to make it seem like a competition. Of course I do wish I could get the data anyway, but I think that’s an admirable motive.
Kevin, acw, and BeeCee, thanks for sharing your experiences! BeeCee, I think you’re spot on that it’s exactly the type of thing I’m hoping to see that I’m likely missing when I’m only counting once a month. It would be interesting to see if the effect were long-lasting enough that I could pick it up, but I guess it’s probably not too likely. I should really find a way to count more frequently!