Since early 2024, the Anchorage Alaska Temple has been undergoing a relocation, with a new temple structure under construction where a nearby stake center had once stood. In the meantime, the original temple has remained operational, but it will be decommissioned when the new temple is finished.
The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has now announced the current Anchorage temple will close on March 22, 2027, prior to the new structure’s dedication.
The relocated Anchorage temple will be dedicated on Sunday, June 13, 2027.
This will follow a public open house from Thursday, May 13, through Saturday, May 29, excluding Sundays. A media day is also scheduled for Monday, May 10, and invited guests will tour the sacred edifice May 11-12, 2027.
These dates were published Monday, Aug. 3, on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
As previously announced, the new temple will take the stake center’s 13111 Brayton Drive address. The current temple — at 13161 Brayton Drive — will be decommissioned, with a new meetinghouse to be built on the existing temple location.
The new temple’s square footage will be approximately 30,000 square feet — an increase of more than 150% from the temple’s current size and more than four times its original size, from before an expansion in 2003.
About the Anchorage temple
Anchorage’s temple was the Church’s first house of the Lord in Alaska and 54th worldwide.
On Oct. 4, 1997, then-Church President Gordon B. Hinckley announced a temple for Anchorage in general conference.
It was one of the first three temples built in a smaller size than typical temples, alongside the Colonia Juárez Chihuahua Mexico and Monticello Utah temples. President Hinckley announced the plan for these smaller houses of the Lord in October 1997 general conference.
On April 17, 1998, ground was broken for the Anchorage temple with some 1,700 people in attendance. Elder F. Melvin Hammond — then a General Authority Seventy and first counselor in the North America Northwest Area presidency — presided over the ceremony.
Almost nine months later, President Hinckley dedicated the Anchorage temple in seven sessions Jan. 9-10, 1999. Some attendees traveled from as far away as Canada’s Yukon territory, 14 hours away by bus.
“May this great work of temple building go forward across the earth to bless Thy people wherever they may be found,” said President Hinckley in his dedicatory prayer. “May all who come with hope and high expectation leave with satisfaction and gratitude, having tasted of the sweet things of Thy divine work.”
The Anchorage temple was later closed in April 2003 for renovation and expansion. Enlarging the temple from 6,800 to 11,937 square feet, the expansion included changing rooms, office space, a laundry area, a patron waiting room and a separate instruction room.
President Hinckley would also rededicate this house of the Lord on Feb. 8, 2004, noting in his rededicatory prayer that “to accommodate an increase in the work and to facilitate its progress, it has become necessary to renovate and to add to this sacred structure so extensively as to require a rededication of the enlarged facility.”
He added that since the time the temple was dedicated five years prior, “a great and wondrous work has here gone forward.”
The Church in Alaska
Currently the Church’s northernmost temple, the Anchorage temple will retain that distinction until the construction of the Fairbanks Alaska Temple, which is currently being built.
Elder Peter M. Johnson — a General Authority Seventy and counselor in the Church’s United States West Area presidency — presided over the Fairbanks temple’s groundbreaking ceremony on Sept. 27, 2025.
The Anchorage and Fairbanks temples are the state’s only two houses of the Lord.
Alaska’s first Latter-day Saint congregation was a branch of three families in Fairbanks. It was organized in July 1938, 21 years before Alaska gained its statehood.
By 1961, the Church counted some 3,050 members in the state — three branches in Anchorage and others in Fairbanks, Palmer and Juneau. The Alaska Stake, the first in the state, was organized in Anchorage on Aug. 13, 1961.
Alaska is now home to around 34,000 Latter-day Saints across 82 wards and branches.
