Latter-day Saint temples are architecturally and functionally separate from the meetinghouses where a ward's ordinary Sunday worship takes place; a congregation may have no temple within hundreds of kilometers while still meeting weekly in its own local meetinghouse. Where a meetinghouse is a single-purpose hall for Sunday services open to any visitor, a temple is arranged around a sequence of distinct rooms, an entry and recommend desk, a baptistry with a font resting on the backs of sculpted oxen, endowment rooms, and one or more sealing rooms, through which a member moves in order as they receive the temple's ordinances. Entry requires a current temple recommend, issued after an interview with local leaders confirming the member's belief and conduct meet the standard the church requires, a restriction that marks temple worship as an inner, rather than public-facing, dimension of Latter-day Saint practice.
The Joseph Smith-era temples at Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois, and the pioneer-era Utah temples that followed at St. George, Logan, Manti and Salt Lake City, established the building type before its ordinances had fully stabilized into their later form; the endowment ceremony performed inside them has been revised more than once since Joseph Smith's lifetime. The church's own architectural output today includes a wide range of temple sizes and styles, from the ornate historic Utah temples to smaller, more standardized designs built rapidly as the church has extended temple access to smaller and more distant congregations worldwide.