Groundbreaking date announced for first Latter-day Saint temple in Cambodia

Groundbreaking date announced for first Latter-day Saint temple in Cambodia

Groundbreaking plans are scheduled in September for a new temple in southeast Asia, the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced in a recent news release.

The Phnom Penh Cambodia Temple groundbreaking will be held on Saturday, Sept. 18.

President Veasna Kuonno Neang of the Cambodia Phnom Penh Mission will preside at the ceremony.

Attendance at the groundbreaking ceremony will be by invitation only based on current local COVID-19 guidelines.

The Phnom Penh Cambodia Temple will be the church’s first temple in that country.

The temple in Cambodia’s capital city was one of 12 announced by President Russell M. Nelson at the end of the October 2018 general conference.

President Nelson unveiled an artists’ rendering and announced the temple’s location during his first visit to Cambodia in November 2019 as part of a global ministry tour.

“I am very optimistic about the future of Cambodia,” President Nelson said in 2019. “Part of that assurety comes as I look in your faces and I feel your spiritual strength and capacity.”

The Phnom Penh Cambodia Temple will be a single-story structure of approximately 10,000 square feet, according to Wednesday’s news release. It will be constructed on a 3.16-acre site located on Russian Confederation Street, between the Cambodia Institute of Technology and the Institute of Foreign Languages near the Royal University of Phnom Penh. The temple site will be shared with an ancillary building.

Cambodia is home to more than 15,000 Latter-day Saints and approximately 30 congregations, according to the church’s newsroom page at ChurchofJesusChrist.org. desecret