Ephraim LDS Temple

Above: Ephraim, UT. 19 November 2025.
Out and about in the Sprinter.
Ephraim LDS Temple.

Newest LDS temple...dedicated 22 October 2025. One of 28 LDS temples in Utah and one of 382 dedicated LDS temples worldwide. There were twelve operating LDS temples operating when I graduated from Provo High School in 1963. LDS temples are built to top quality material and design standards bespeaking a financially well-endowed church.

Estimates of LDS Church net worth in 1963, when I graduated from high school, run as high as $1 billion. Estimated net worth of the LDS Church in 2025 is $290 billion (Grok). Harvard University, with its $57 billion endowment, is as much of a hedge fund as a university. One could draw the same comparison for the LDS Church.... a hedge fund... and a Church.

I have wondered: How do LDS leaders allocate their time between Church management... doctrine, membership, missionary program and "hedge fund" management... lawyers, Wall Street...EFT's, agricultural properties. What are the conflicts, if any, between these two exigencies? How does one demand influence the other, if at all? Can the "demands" be effectively siloed? The LDS Church is not stingy. It donates, ecumenically, worldwide to charities and natural disasters up to $1 billion a year. What a contrast is today's Church compared to the LDS Church's formative days in the 19th century when the Church's thinly capitalized Perpetual Emigration Fund made loans to emigrant converts to fund their handcarts as they walked across 1500 miles of plains America from Nebraska to Salt Lake City.

I have also wondered: Is the significant growth in wealth and temple building paralleled by membership growth in numbers and in strength of membership devotion? That's for another discussion.

TIMDT and Mwah (sic) know Ephraim pretty well. We had travelled there frequently during the early aughts when I was a member of the board of directors of Snow College's Traditional Building Skills Inc. affiliate. We have also been periodic donors to Snow College. We wanted to see the new temple and how it fit into the Ephraim landscape. So, we returned to Park City from Ivins via the back way, US 89 through Sanpete County.

The temple had an ethereal look in unusually rare atmospherics. While we were in Ephraim It was approaching twilight at 4:30 PM. There was a light rain. The sun, low on the western horizon, filtered light through the variegated cloud cover. We felt we had a special viewing of the outside of the prepossessing temple as shown in the image above.