The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced the site for the Greenville South Carolina Temple, setting the project on an 8.8-acre parcel at the south intersection of Independence Boulevard/Ponders Road and Roper Mountain Road in Greenville. Plans call for an 18,850-square-foot, single-story temple.
The Greenville temple will be the first in the Upstate and the state’s second temple, adding a new place of worship in a region where Latter-day Saints already meet in around 90 congregations. South Carolina’s only other operating temple is in Columbia, where the Columbia South Carolina Temple was dedicated in 1999.
The announcement gives the project a clear location after years in which members in the state had to look to Columbia for a temple. Nearly 47,000 Latter-day Saints live in South Carolina, and the Greenville site places the church’s next temple closer to a fast-growing part of the state.
That is the point of the new temple and the reason the site matters now: it moves the church’s temple presence beyond Columbia and into the Upstate, where many members have long had no nearby temple. The Greenville project is still defined by its site announcement, but the footprint and scale already show it is being planned as a single-story building rather than a large urban complex.
For the mormon church, the Greenville temple fills a gap in a state that already has a substantial Latter-day Saint presence but only one operating temple. For members in the Upstate, it turns an announcement into a local project they can point to, and it makes South Carolina one step farther from being a one-temple state.
