The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced a groundbreaking date for the Tarawa Kiribati Temple.
Elder Jeremy R. Jaggi, a General Authority Seventy and second counselor in the Pacific Area presidency, will preside over the Nov. 2, 2024, groundbreaking of the house of the Lord in Tarawa, an atoll and the capital of the Republic of Kiribati.
The groundbreaking announcement was first published Monday, Sept. 9, on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
President Russell M. Nelson announced a temple for Tarawa, Kiribati, on Oct. 4, 2020, one of six locations for new houses of the Lord that the President of the Church identified at the conclusion of the October 2020 general conference.
The Tarawa temple’s site and exterior renderings were released May 19, 2021, projecting a single-story edifice of approximately 10,000 square feet, with a center spire. The 0.80-acre site at Ambo, South Tarawa, will include not only the temple but also a new meetinghouse and a facility for patron housing. An additional ancillary facility will be located 450 meters west of the temple site.
Kiribati is currently in the Suva Fiji Temple district — that temple is 2,168 kilometers (1,171 nautical miles) southeast of Kiribati.
The Church counts more than 22,650 Latter-day Saints in Kiribati — or about one out of every six residents — in two stakes, 37 congregations and one mission.
Kiribati — pronounced “KEE-ruh-bas” — is a collection of 33 Micronesian islands in the mid-Pacific, where the equator and international dateline meet.
Church roots trace back to local school teacher Waitea Abiuta asking if his graduates could attend Liahona High School in Tonga, with the request approved in 1972. Abiuta and several students converted to the Latter-day Saint faith, and the students later served as Kiribati’s first missionaries, in October 1975.
The first constructed meetinghouse was completed in 1984, and the late Elder L. Tom Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles organized the first stake in 1996.
