This guest post comes from Zatch, who last year also shared “Go to the House Mansion of the Lord.”
My spouse and I were talking earlier about the challenge of staffing all those new temples. Clearly steps have already been taken to limit the number of personnel required to operate a temple:
- Recorded movies/slideshows instead of live actors in the endowment presentation
- Digitization (bar codes on ordinance cards)
- Minimizing physical contact in the endowment ceremony
- Removing laundries, cafeterias
At one point in our conversation my spouse joked that maybe they’ll just use AI to fill in the gaps. That got us thinking about the role of technology in the temple, and how it could be used to further reduce the staffing footprint required. We came up with the following ideas, arranged roughly in order of most to least feasible (or least to most wacko):
- Digital translation – Bilingual temple workers are great, but your smartphone can deliver a live translation of your rote ordinance recitation just as easily.
- Automated entry kiosks replacing workers at the recommend desk. Would be easy-peasy to implement; I go through three of these on my way to work every morning: one to get on the metro, one to get into my building, and one to get into my corridor.
- Dynamic scheduling – When making an appointment online, you put in a few times you’d be available (sort of like a whenisgood.com poll). The system compiles everyone’s availability and uses an algorithm to optimize the schedule automatically.
- Single-use (paper) endowment packets – Further reducing the need for laundry.
- Remote witnesses – Imagine a security guard watching a single screen with multiple camera angles, but instead of watching for thieves the person is watching for, say, feet coming out of the water. Also easy to implement, and while maybe not necessary most times since witnesses tend to come from within the group of participants, could still come in handy when the group is sufficiently small.
- Digital assistant kiosks rather than female ordinance workers to answer FAQs and direct patrons. The system could be linked to your temple recommend to provide custom information about your upcoming appointment and assistance for those with particular needs. You could also do this with directional floor lighting and smart elevators. Or, you know, signage.
- VR headsets to view the endowment presentation individually – With the recent changes to the endowment, I don’t think there is any need to be in a group or to interact with an actual person at all until you reach the veil. If you just give patrons a VR headset and let them come on their own schedule (rather than at discrete session start times) I bet you could keep a couple of men stationed at the veil continuously, rather than needing to surge with several veil workers at the same time.
- Messenger robots – Intra-temple communication tends to be workers delivering messages verbally. You could do this with robots – or even, like, phones, pagers, text messages, etc. We’re not hurting for communications tech.
- Robot ordinance workers – Wouldn’t be hard; the words are rote and the motions aren’t particularly sophisticated. My gut says this is a non-starter, since they didn’t even allow Zoom blessing of the sacrament, but on the other hand most of the endowment is already a recording, including parts that were performed live by the witness couple up until covid.
Another possibility is to pay people to be temple workers (which they already do for presidencies, recorders, cafeteria staff, some laundry workers, some custodial workers). But, like, yeah right.
Any other ways the Church can keep all of its new temples open?
When Sister Harper woke up, it was just another day of service at the West American Fork temple. But after seeing something startling in traffic, she misses her turn and ends up at the East American Fork temple. She enters to discover another Sister Harper, identical to herself. Working together, they race to the other 53 temples in Utah to uncover a cloning plot that leads all the way to the Church Office Building, evading ecclesiastical officers along the way.
I’ve been an ordinance worker in one of the smaller temples. You can in fact run such a temple on a pretty small staff. The one thing I’d say is that the staffing needs are skewed male because you have to have men behind the veil at the end of the session. Allowing women to help at the recommend desk has been a good start to evening out that load. Why not allow women to receive behind the veil while we’re at it? If we’re serious about the idea of having heavenly parents of both genders, surely a woman can also represent God? The theological implications are interesting, but maybe a bit too radical for today’s church leadership. I do believe this will happen one day.
Particularly at larger temples, quite a few temple workers could be replaced with a good sign that says “go this way”. I generally have a very good sense of direction, but I can never seem to figure out which direction the correct locker room is. (I guess my sense of direction is a satanic gift that doesn’t work in the temple?)
Next, we can do away with the workers who are just there to direct you to an empty spot to change clothes. They could use lights to indicate where to go, or when passing through the recommend desk each patron could be given a locker assignment then.
[Bonus thought: what if we just showed up wearing white clothes? Particularly for people making short drives from home to the temple, what is the point of me putting on dark pants at home, driving 5 minutes to the temple, walking into the temple and then changing into white pants? At some temples (Utah) the locker rooms could be almost entirely eliminated freeing up floor space. Temples where people are more likely to be making long trips, or taking mass transit, etc., would probably need to keep them.]
Because the temple ceremonies are all extremely scripted, there is virtually no part of it that can’t be replaced by a recording. It’s clearly allowed for 99% of the endowment. Doing it for new names would be trivial. Either AI could read the script, or they could just have a temple worker make a recording once per day.
But the biggest answer is that we’ll just shift from running temples 70 hours per week to 30 hours per week when the demand is higher. Some (many?) already do this. Right now just barely over half of temples that have been announced are operating. (190 out of 367.) So in theory we’re looking at another doubling of operating temples in the next 10 years.