Ordinances and Expansion

The ordinances performed inside a Latter-day Saint temple are held by the church to be essential rather than optional elements of its theology of salvation, which is why temple-building has expanded so aggressively relative to the church's overall growth. Baptism for the dead, performed by a living proxy on behalf of a deceased person, extends the ordinance the church considers necessary for salvation to ancestors who died without receiving it, a doctrine that also underlies the church's extensive genealogical research through FamilySearch. The endowment is a ceremony of instruction and covenant involving washing and anointing, ritual clothing, and a narrated instruction sequence historically staged with actors or, in modern temples, film; sealing is the ordinance that marries a couple, or attaches a child to parents, for what the church teaches is eternity rather than for life alone, a doctrine that distinguishes Latter-day Saint marriage theology sharply from other Christian traditions' view of marriage as ending at death.

Only twenty-odd temples existed worldwide as late as the 1970s; by the early twenty-first century the church had adopted a strategy of building smaller temples closer to concentrations of members rather than relying on a few large regional temples, and the number in operation, under construction or announced has grown into the hundreds across every populated continent. Because access to the temple's ordinances is central to Latter-day Saint theology of salvation for both the living and the dead, the pace of this expansion functions within the church as a direct index of its own account of its mission's progress.