Twin sisters Emily and Elise Cuff, who turned 12 in January, are excited that a temple for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will soon be built near their home in Auckland, New Zealand.
For their first temple experience, the twins were able to visit the Melbourne Australia Temple before COVID-19 travel restrictions were implemented.
The twins both love the spirit they feel in the temple, they say.
"We can’t wait to go back!”
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Emily Cuff (left) and her twin sister Elise (right) look at an artist’s rendering of the Auckland New Zealand Temple.© 2020 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.
The girls will not have to wait very long. The ground-breaking ceremony for the Auckland New Zealand Temple will take place on Saturday 13 June 2020. Elder Ian S. Ardern, president of the Pacific Area of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, will preside.
Attendance at the temple site for the ground-breaking is by invitation, but the public is invited to watch a recording of the proceedings via online video transmission on Sunday 14 June at 6:00 p.m. NZST.
The video will be accessible on the Church's Pacific Area website (pacific.churchofjesuschrist.org) and on the Church's Pacific Area Facebook page, where it will be pinned as a “watch party.”
The Auckland Temple’s hilltop site sits between the New Zealand Missionary Training Centre and the Auckland New Zealand Redoubt Stake Centre.
During a ministering tour of the Pacific Islands in May 2019, President Russell M. Nelson, worldwide leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, announced that the temple will be a “two-storey building with a granite exterior. Its light and beauty will be highly visible” to residents and motorists travelling along Auckland’s Southern Motorway.
The Church purchased the land on Redoubt Road in Manukau, Auckland, as a possible future site for a meetinghouse and a “religious learning facility” in 1996. Since that time, the number of stakes in the Auckland area has increased from nine to 13.
A stake centre and missionary training centre were built on the Manukau property in 2010, but local Saints continued to hope that someday a temple would be added to the complex.
The announcement of a new temple to be erected in Auckland came on 7 October 2018, over 60 years after the dedication of the Hamilton New Zealand Temple. That temple is currently closed for extensive renovation and is not scheduled to reopen for at least another year, so Kiwi Latter-day Saints are grateful that construction on the Auckland Temple is about to begin.
Emily and Elise are part of the third generation of a temple-loving family. The girls’ parents, Jared and Mable Cuff, are regular temple-goers. Their grandparents, Ross and Barbara Cuff, served as leaders in the Hamilton New Zealand Temple from 2010 to 2013.
In the Church’s April 2020 general conference, President Russell M. Nelson said: “Temples are a crowning part of the Restoration of the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In God’s goodness and generosity, He is bringing the blessings of the temple closer to His children everywhere.”