The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced the dedication and open house dates for the Abidjan Ivory Coast Temple, the first house of the Lord in the west Africa nation
Elder Ronald A. Rasband of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles will dedicate the Abidjan Ivory Coast Temple on May 25, 2025, with the 10 a.m. session to be broadcast to all units in the temple district.
Prior to the dedication, a media day will be held on Monday, April 28, followed by invited-guest tours through Wednesday, April 30. The public temple open house is scheduled to run from Thursday, May 1, through Saturday, May 17, excluding Sundays.
The dedication and open house information was first published Monday, Nov. 11, on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
The Abidjan temple was one of three new temples — along with since-dedicated houses of the Lord in Bangkok, Thailand, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti — that were announced by the late President Thomas S. Monson on April 5, 2015, during the Sunday morning session of general conference.
The temple was built adjacent to the Cocody Cote d’Ivoire Stake Center
Construction on the Abidjan temple followed the Nov. 8, 2018, groundbreaking ceremony, with Elder Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles presiding over the services and offering a prayer dedicating the temple site and the construction processes.
Missionary work in Côte d’Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, began just three decades ago, and the first meetinghouses in late 1990s. In his April 2015 general conference address (the same conference as the aforementioned temple announcements), Elder Andersen highlighted a pair of the Church’s “pioneer” couples in the country — Lucien and Agathe Affoue and Philippe and Annelies Assard — who separately had joined the Church in Europe before relocating in Ivory Coast in the 1980s and meeting and forming a Sunday School.
Today, the country is home to more than 63,000 Latter-day Saints in over 260 congregations.
The Abidjan Ivory Coast Temple will be the seventh on or just off of the African continent, joining the Praia Cape Verde Temple, Accra Ghana Temple, Aba Nigeria Temple, Kinshasa Democratic Republic of the Congo Temple, Durban South Africa Temple and Johannesburg South Africa Temple. Four more temples are under construction, with another 17 announced and in planning and design.
