You know what it looks like when a promise turns into a building. First there’s just dirt, stakes, a rendering on a church website. Then there’s a shovel, a small crowd, a date people will remember. That happened this month in Colorado Springs, on a quiet corner most drivers have passed a hundred times without a second look.
Construction has begun on Colorado’s fourth temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a 45,000-square-foot building that church leaders say will serve members across the region for generations. It’s a story about faith, yes. It’s also a story about what a community actually does when it decides something is worth building.
Ground breaks in Colorado Springs
The groundbreaking happened September 12, on an 18.6-acre site at the corner of Flying Horse Club Drive and Barossa Valley Road, according to Church News, the Church’s own reporting outlet. A small crowd gathered. A shovel turned dirt that had, until that morning, just been a field.
That’s the whole ceremony, mechanically speaking. It’s brief. It’s simple. But it marks the exact moment a plan becomes a project — the point where “someday” gets a start date.
Every temple on record started this same way. A patch of ground. A small group. A shovel that means more than its size suggests.
Who presided, and what he said
Elder Karl D. Hirst, a General Authority Seventy serving in the Church’s United States Central Area presidency, presided over the ceremony. He asked attendees to consider their own dedication to God — not just the building’s.
Their work in the temple, he said, will strengthen them and refine them spiritually. Notice the direction of that sentence. It isn’t about the structure changing anyone. It’s about what people bring to it, and what they let it do to them once it’s finished.
That’s a small but real distinction. A building doesn’t do the spiritual work on its own. The people walking through it do.
Colorado’s fourth temple, not its first
This is Colorado’s fourth Latter-day Saint temple, following ones in Denver, Fort Collins and Grand Junction. Four temples in one state says something about growth that a single announcement can’t capture on its own.
Colorado Springs sits roughly seventy miles from the Denver temple — close enough that you might wonder why the region needs a second one. But congregations grow past the point where one building can reasonably serve them. Travel time adds up. Wait times for temple ordinances add up too.
A fourth temple isn’t redundancy. It’s a region outgrowing what used to be enough.
Where the story started, October 2023
This groundbreaking isn’t the beginning of the story — just the visible part. President Russell M. Nelson first announced this temple in October 2023, during general conference, as one of twenty new temple sites named that day.
Three years passed between that announcement and dirt actually moving. Land had to be found, purchased, rezoned in some cases, designed around. None of that happens quickly, and almost none of it happens in public.
The groundbreaking is the moment the private planning finally becomes something you can drive past and point at.
Twenty announced that day, one of them here
The Colorado Springs temple wasn’t announced alone. It was one name in a list of twenty, read out in a single general conference address. Most churches don’t build at that scale, or at that pace, anywhere in the world.
Nineteen other communities heard their own name called that same October morning. Some of those projects have already broken ground. Others are still working through the same quiet, invisible steps Colorado Springs just finished — land, permits, design.
It’s worth remembering that this specific groundbreaking is one small piece of something much larger happening at the same time, in places most of us will never visit.
Forty-five thousand square feet, one story
The building itself will run about 45,000 square feet, designed as a single story rather than stacking upward. That’s a modest footprint by temple standards — some run considerably larger — but size here isn’t really the measure that matters.
A single-story design tends to read as approachable rather than monumental. It sits into a neighborhood instead of towering over it. For a building meant to serve ordinary members on ordinary weekday visits, that’s a deliberate choice, not a limitation.
What matters isn’t how tall it stands. It’s how many people walk through the doors once it’s finished.
What a groundbreaking ceremony actually is
It would be easy to read “groundbreaking” as just a ribbon-cutting with dirt instead of ribbon. It’s more than that. It’s a formal marker that construction has legally, practically begun — permits cleared, contractors ready, a timeline now running.
For members, it’s also the first chance to physically stand where the temple will be. Before this, it’s plans on paper. After this, it’s a place you can point to and say: there. That one. Ours.
Ceremony and construction start on the same day for a reason. The moment needs marking, not just the milestone.
Why a building matters as much as a belief
You could argue faith doesn’t need architecture. People pray in living rooms, in cars, on hospital chairs. All of that is true, and none of it makes the building beside the point.
A temple isn’t decoration on top of belief. For Latter-day Saints, it’s where specific ordinances happen — sealings, endowments, work considered central to the faith rather than optional extras. You can’t do those things in a living room. The building isn’t symbolic. It’s functional, in the deepest sense of that word.
That’s the part easy to miss from the outside. The architecture isn’t there to impress anyone. It’s there because certain things require a specific kind of room.
Plenty of faith traditions get by without a dedicated building for this kind of work. This one doesn’t try to. It builds the room first, then does the work inside it — a sequence that says the setting isn’t incidental to the practice.
How a temple like this one gets paid for
One detail rarely makes it into coverage of a new temple: how it gets funded. The Church has long stated that temple construction is paid for through member tithing, not debt — no mortgage, no bond issue, no builder waiting on a loan to clear.
That’s a different financial model than most large construction projects run on. It means a temple doesn’t open owing anyone money. It also means the pace of building, across twenty projects at once, depends on what a global membership actually contributes, not on what a bank is willing to lend.
Whatever you make of the theology, the financial discipline behind it is its own kind of consistency — building only what’s already been paid for, rather than building on the promise of payment later.
What construction on a temple actually looks like
From here, the timeline is years, not months. Site work, foundation, structural framing, interior finishing, landscaping — the same sequence as any large building, just executed with the finish level a sacred space demands.
Somewhere in that sequence, the Church will typically hold a public open house before the building is dedicated — a window where anyone, member or not, can walk through before it’s set apart for temple use only. That’s still ahead for Colorado Springs, likely a year or more out.
Until then, what’s visible from the road is what’s visible at any construction site: equipment, fencing, progress measured in months rather than days.
Why it carries the city’s name
Latter-day Saint temples are named for the city they sit in, not for a donor, a founder, or a historical figure. This one will be the Colorado Springs Colorado Temple, plainly, the same way Denver’s is the Denver Colorado Temple.
That naming convention is small but tells you something. The building belongs to the place first, and to the members who will actually walk through it, second. It isn’t a monument to any single person’s name or gift.
Drive past it in a few years, and the name on the sign will simply describe where you are. Nothing more, nothing less.
Who a project like this actually serves
It’s tempting to read a big building project as being about leadership, ambition, institutional growth. Mostly, it’s about a member in Pueblo or Woodland Park who currently drives an hour or more to Denver for a temple visit, and who won’t have to much longer.
Regional growth means more of those members closer to a temple, not further from one. That’s the actual, unglamorous math behind the announcement — travel time, distance, ordinary logistics that shape how often someone can practically participate in their faith.
A fourth temple in one state is a story about people driving less, not a story about anyone building a monument.
What “for generations” is actually asking of a congregation
Church leaders describe this temple as one that will serve members “for generations.” That’s not just a nice phrase. It’s a specific kind of commitment — to a building, a location, a community that doesn’t yet fully exist.
Some of the people this temple will serve haven’t been born yet. Some of the members attending the groundbreaking won’t live to see its fiftieth anniversary. Building for generations means building past your own lifetime, on purpose, without resentment about it.
There’s something worth sitting with in that. Most of what we build — careers, homes, even friendships — gets measured on a human timescale. This gets measured on a longer one entirely.
It’s a strange kind of patience, building for people you’ll never meet. It’s also, arguably, the most generous kind there is. Nobody at this groundbreaking will personally use up all forty-five thousand square feet of it.
Foundations as promise-keeping
A groundbreaking is a small ceremony that carries a large promise. It says: this will be finished. It says: what was announced three years ago is now actually happening, in dirt and permits and contractors, not just in a conference talk.
We tend to trust promises more once we can see them being kept in real time. A shovel in the ground on September 12 is exactly that kind of proof — not the whole promise fulfilled, but the first visible evidence that it will be.
A few things worth carrying from this one, whatever your own faith or lack of it:
1) Big commitments start small. A three-year gap between announcement and groundbreaking isn’t delay — it’s the actual work of planning something meant to last.
2) The building isn’t the point; what happens inside it is. Elder Hirst’s own words framed it that way, and it’s worth taking him at it.
3) You don’t have to see the finish to trust the foundation. Most of what matters in a life or a community gets built the same way — slowly, past your own timeline, on purpose.
None of that requires you to share the theology. It only asks you to notice what a community does when it decides something is worth the wait.
This content was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Womens Overview editors prior to publication.