This week, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly called Mormons, released an exterior rendering of its planned temple for the Huntsville area.

The temple would be the second in Alabama, following the opening of the Birmingham-area temple in Gardendale in 2000.

The planned 30,000-square-foot Huntsville-area temple would be on 21 acres about 11 miles west of Huntsville. That structure will be nearly three times the size of the Birmingham-area temple, which is 10,700 square feet. The single-story Huntsville temple would be at the southeast corner of Gillespie and Browns Ferry roads in the city of Madison.

Russell M. Nelson, president for the Salt Lake City-based denomination, announced 17 new temple locations, including the one for Huntsville, at the denomination’s October 2024 general conference.

That makes 34 temples announced in 2024 and a total of 185 since 2018, when Nelson became president. It will bring the number of temples to 367 worldwide. The denomination’s global membership stands at 17.5 million at the end of 2024, with more than 40,000 members in Alabama in about 75 congregations.

Local congregations worship weekly at church buildings called wards, grouped into stakes, and members travel to a regional temple for certain rituals. The rituals include baptism for dead relatives to secure their salvation, with the belief that the deceased can choose to accept the salvation in the afterlife. There is also the marriage sealing ritual of the husband and wife and also the sealing of children to their parents to create an eternal family unit.

Jeffrey Cazier, the Huntsville stake president, said some members in his stake traveled to temples in Washington D.C., then Atlanta, Ga., and, more recently Birmingham for such rituals.

“It’s such an incredible blessing,” Cazier said. “It’s a testimony that the Lord loves His children and wants to make the blessings of the temple more easily accessible for everyone. I’m so excited that it will be so close. There is a power that comes with the temple, and I’m glad for the city of Huntsville and northern Alabama to be blessed by it.”