Religious Buildings of Silver Spring, MD

On the same day I walked through National Park Seminary, I visited two vastly different religious buildings in Silver Spring, MD. I visited the massive Washington DC Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (formerly called Mormons) and the much smaller Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I enjoyed meeting the people at both locations and comparing the differences between faiths.

While I have previously stopped by Mormon church buildings, including one in Cambridge, MA, and have a better understanding of the religion than most non-believers, I had never gone to a visitor center at a temple. These temples are sacred spaces set aside for members of the religion who are in good standing with their local congregations. While activities in these spaces were historically kept secret, this religion has become much more open in recent years, and photographs of some interior spaces are available on the website. One core belief in this religion is that the family unit is preserved in the afterlife, but only if a family has been “sealed” with a wedding ceremony at the temple and every child “sealed” upon adulthood. These beliefs and their respective rituals contain elements found in traditional Christian practices, Freemason ceremonies, and Ancient Egyptian polytheism.

Since Latter-Day Saints want to be more open, they have created a state-of-the-art visitor center to explain their faith. I enjoyed the artwork, including an eleven-foot-tall statue of Jesus Christ, a complex stained-glass window with symbols from across the gospels, digital interactives, and scale models of the temple and similar buildings. The guide was highly knowledgeable about her religion, although many of her explanations did not align to my own knowledge of world history and archaeology. She also seemed to be portraying an overly sweet character, like the princesses at Disney World. She did “break character” once as we were exploring the stained glass window, and I wish all of our tour had been conducted this way.

As for facts about the temple, the property covers almost 58 acres (0.23 km sq) of land and includes manicured gardens plus plenty of parking. The tallest tower is 288 feet (87.8 m) high, the biggest of any Latter-day Saint building, and is topped by a statue of the angel Moroni, who is 18 feet (5.5 m) tall. The white marble cladding the temple comes from Alabama, while Moroni is plated with gold. If you do not have the time to stop by the visitor center, you can easily view this building from the nearby highway.

Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church is much smaller, but all are welcome inside the building. The congregation was founded in 1936 as part of the Presbyterian Church of America, now Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). Services were originally held in Washington, DC, but the congregation moved to Silver Spring around 1945 and soon constructed this building. I had guessed this timeline due to its post-World War II red brick construction. The layout is similar to Fairlawn Christian Reformed Church where I once worked, which was constructed in 1960. Knox OPC is regularly attended by parishioners of all ages and would be a good church for moderately conservative Calvinists / Reformed Christians.