Chapel vs. Temple

The Church is unusual among Christian churches in having two different types of worship spaces, chapels and temples. Chapels are open to anyone, even if most people who participate are members. Temples are open only to members, and not even all members, but only those who have cleared hurdles of belief and commandment-following. Chapels are, at least potentially, at the center of community-building. We not only go to worship services there, but also to ward activities or activities run by organizations within the ward, like the Relief Society. There are even sometimes public-facing events in chapels, like blood drives or voting. In temples, by contrast, we largely do things “alone in one another’s presence,” to borrow a phrase from a BYU professor (who was advising us that movies didn’t make good settings for dates). Although there is a little more interaction in sealings and baptisms than endowments, for example, temples are far inferior to chapels as sites of building community.

As a heretic who’s on the outside of the temple, I still find a lot of value in the community-building possibilities of the Church. So I’m disappointed that since he’s taken office, President Nelson has shown himself to be far more interested in the church of the temple than the church of the chapel. For example, here’s something he said in Sheri Dew’s 2019 book about him: “The only buildings that are absolutely essential are temples. Stake centers and chapels are a luxury.” This was in the context of talking about making church more home-centered, so he might not have meant it to be quite as anti-chapel as it comes across here. But I’m still honestly struck in a bad way that he would refer to church buildings as a “luxury.”

To be fair, I can see why he might see less value in chapels. If his goal is to get people on the covenant path, only their baptism and confirmation take place in a chapel. After that, it’s all temple ordinances. Attending church in a supportive ward might be a nice to have, but it’s not going to make the difference in exaltation. President Nelson, like many of his fellow GAs, is also clearly deeply concerned with people’s loyalty to the Church. Chapel worship is all well and good in this area, as you’ll hear lots of rhetoric about how the Church is God’s one true organization, but the chapel doesn’t provide the opportunity like the temple endowment does for members to promise all that they have or ever will have to the Church. I can see how this makes the temple far better in President Nelson’s eyes.

And of course President Nelson isn’t just talk when it comes to valuing the temple over the chapel. He’s announced a huge number of temples, many of which have been started, and a few of which have even been completed. And on the chapel side, I was intrigued to see an analysis linked on the Mormon subreddit a few months ago, done by u/xanimyle, that shows the distribution of years the Church’s chapels were built. I’ve reproduced their graph below, and here’s a link to the original post.

The contrast with temples is striking, isn’t it? Clearly building chapels has become far less of a priority for the Church in recent years than building temples, and this even predates President Nelson. It looks like there was a surge in chapel-building activity around the turn of the millennium that coincided with Gordon B. Hinckley’s temple-building spree, but since then, the trend has been mostly down.

There are other elements to the trend toward less emphasis on chapel church that also predate President Nelson. He was the one who shortened Sunday meetings from three hours to two, but this seemed like a change that was a long time coming. Pilot tests of it were reported on the blogs for years. And for decades, as has often been discussed on the Bloggernacle, a lot of non-Sunday activities like road shows and sports leagues and Boy Scouts have been dropped. Visiting and home teaching have been replaced by the lower-key ministering, another Nelson-era change that feels like an acknowledgement of the reality that only the most zealous among us are going to get into each other’s homes to read a First Presidency message once a month. The whole trend of decline in community at church has been discussed in a number of posts at W&T. For example, see this one from Dave B. and this one from hawkgrrrl.

To be clear, I agree with a lot of these changes. I never liked the use of Boy Scouts as the YM program. The changes seem to match the reality that most Mormons now don’t live in the Mormon corridor where wards are geographically smaller and it’s easier to get together for ward activities or visit a neighbor a street or two over for visiting teaching. But they’re still clearly signs of a decrease in emphasis on chapel church, especially in combination with the increased discussion of the covenant path and announcement and building of temples. I wonder if the thought in President Nelson’s mind with calling church buildings a luxury isn’t wondering how thin of a church experience people can have on the chapel side and still hang on as members enough to go to the temple regularly. To me, it’s a depressing vision.

Of course there are scriptures on the other side that call for community. For example, the oft-quoted lines from Alma in Mosiah 18 about mourning with those who mourn seem like they’d be awfully hard to pull off without a community of some kind. Or Moroni in Moroni 6 explaining that people who were baptized were “numbered among the people of the church of Christ; and their names were taken, that they might be remembered and nourished by the good word of God.” And in last Conference, Gerrit W. Gong even made a mild call for more church activities:

For some time I have felt that, in many places in the Church, a few more ward activities, of course planned and implemented with gospel purpose, could knit us together with even greater belonging and unity.

Elder Gong is a long way down on the seniority list, though. I wonder how much President Nelson’s successors will continue his agenda of emphasizing the temple over the chapel.