Ordinance Room - Development of Ordinance Rooms

Development of Ordinance Rooms

The first building to have ordinance rooms, designed to conduct the Endowment, was Joseph Smith's store in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1842. Using canvas, Smith divided the store's large, second-floor room into "departments," which represented "the interior of a temple as much as circumstances would permit" (Anderson & Bergera, Quorum of Anointed, 2). The departments included a garden with potted plants and a veil. (Ibid., 3-4). After conducting the endowment services, Smith told Brigham Young, "This is not arranged right but we have done the best we could under the circumstances in which we are placed." Smith concluded that he wanted Young to "organize and systemize all these ceremonies." (Ibid., 6-7). After Smith's assassination in 1844, Young also used canvas to divide the large attic room in the Nauvoo Temple in the departments. Participants in the Nauvoo Temple ceremonies used the same names for these departments as the ordinance rooms in later temples: Garden Room, World Room, Terrestrial Room, Celestial Room, and Sealing Room, which was also called the Holy of Holies. (Anderson & Bergera, Endowment Companies, 2-4, 377; Smith, 204-206). With the resumption of temple ordinances in Salt Lake City in the 1850s, Young followed the same method of using canvas to divide an upper floor of the Council House into the ordinance departments (Hyde, 90-99).

The above arrangement for administering the Endowment consisted of only temporary modifications to a building's interior rooms; obviously canvas partitions were not meant to be permanent. The first building to be designed specifically with actual progressive-style ordinance rooms for presentation of the Endowment was the Endowment House built in 1855 on Temple Square. This structure had the same rooms as the Nauvoo Temple and Council House, including a Garden Room with murals and potted evergreen plants, but the Sealing Room was not called the Holy of Holies (Tingen, 10). However, when the St. George Utah Temple, was completed in 1877, Young followed the Nauvoo Temple pattern of using "frame petitions with the curtains and doors" for Endowment rooms (McKinney, 7:305). Apparently, the rooms were later made more permanent in 1881, when a group of Utah artists painted murals on the walls (O'Brien, 14-15).

Perhaps, using the precedent of the rooms in Endowment House and St. George, architect Truman O. Angell, Jr., specifically designed the Logan Utah Temple interior with progressive ordinance rooms; the first temple so designed, which was dedicated in 1884. Manti Utah Temple architect, William Folsom, followed the same arrangement for that temple, which was dedicated in 1888. Based on his experience with the Logan Temple, Angell petitioned Church president John Taylor to override Brigham Young's original design for the Salt Lake Temple's interior with progressive ordinance rooms, which Taylor enthusiastically approved (Salt Lake Temple, 54-55). This became the pattern for all temples until the construction of the Bern Switzerland Temple, when non-progressive ordinance rooms were developed to incorporate the new filmed Endowment ceremony (Buerger, 166).

From the 1950s until 2002, Mormon temples were built with between one and fourteen ordinance rooms, any one of which could accommodate the entire endowment ceremony, combining the functions of the four progressive-style rooms. When the Nauvoo Illinois Temple was built in 2002, it was designed with progressive ordinance rooms, apparently as a tribute to the original Nauvoo temple (2005 Church Almanac, 495-555). Temples built since 2002 have generally paired two ordinance rooms together. In this arrangement, the first room combines the functions of the Creation, Garden, and World rooms, while the second serves as the Terrestrial room, thus restoring part of the progressive style of earlier temples. However, no matter the number or arrangement of ordinances rooms, the Celestial room is always a separate room, which culminates the Endowment experience. After the Endowment is a culmination of the temple rites administered in the Sealing Room and the Holy of Holies.

The following description of the various rooms is based on James E. Talmage's The House of the Lord, which is typical of similar rooms in other Mormon temples. These ordinance rooms reflect the overall temple ceremonies, which is an overview of God's plan for humanity. Beginning with the creation, the endowment reviews man's mortal existence, and what one must do in order to return to God's presence as husband and wife with their children.