The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced an adjustment to the number of dedication sessions of the Tallahassee Florida Temple, now at a single session.
Elder Patrick Kearon of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles will dedicate the Tallahassee Florida Temple on Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024, with the one dedicatory session at 9 a.m. to be broadcast to all units within the new temple district.
An afternoon session had been included when the Tallahassee temple dedication was first announced on July 1.
The updated adjustment to the single session was first published Tuesday, Sept. 3, on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
The change in dedication sessions is similar to an adjustment made last week with the Casper Wyoming Temple, with a change of dedication date and a move from two dedicatory sessions to just one 10 a.m. session.
The Tallahassee temple will be the Church’s third dedicated house of the Lord in the state, with the Orlando Florida Temple dedicated in 1994 and the Fort Lauderdale Florida Temple dedicated in 2014.
After 30 years of operations, the Orlando temple closed in July for extensive renovations, which were announced in February of this year.
Two other temples for Florida — in Tampa and in Jacksonville — have been announced and in planning since 2022, with sites released for both.
Prior to its dedication, the Tallahassee Florida Temple will be open for media, invited guests and public tours. A media day is scheduled for Monday, Oct. 28, with invited guests to tour the temple Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct. 29-30.
A public open house will run from Monday, Nov. 4, through Saturday, Nov. 23, excluding Sundays.
The single-story temple of approximately 29,000 square feet has been built on a 4.97-acre site at 2440 Papillon Way in northeastern Tallahassee, the largest city in the Florida Panhandle and the state’s capital. Adjacent to an existing Church meetinghouse, the site also includes a distribution center.
Announced on April 5, 2020, by President Russell M. Nelson, the Tallahassee Florida Temple was among eight locations for new houses of the Lord identified in the closing session of the April 2020 general conference. The site location and exterior rendering were released on Jan. 12, 2021.
Construction on the Tallahassee temple followed the June 5, 2021, groundbreaking ceremony, with Elder James B. Martino, then a General Authority Seventy and president of the Church’s North America Southeast Area, presiding at the event and offering a prayer on the site and the construction process.
Tallahassee currently is in the Orlando temple district, with that temple some 260 miles away.
Missionaries first arrived in Florida in 1845, with the Church’s first congregation in the state created in 1847 in the Big Bend area of northern Florida. Today, the state is home to more than 172,000 Latter-day Saints comprising nearly 275 congregations.
Note: A previous version of this article had a different start time for the single morning dedication session; the 9 a.m. time is a recent update.
