During the first week in October, more than 1700 people came to the West Jordon Adventist church to tour the Old Testament sanctuary—not the original, of course, but a life-size replica called Messiah's Mansion.

West Jordan members raised over $11,000 and donated approximately 700 hours of volunteer labor, as tour guides, to bring Messiah's Mansion to Utah. "It was a lot of work, but we received over 100 Bible study interests and almost as many health seminar interests and prophecy study interests," says church member, Robyn Cordova.

Members declared that the experience was worth all the hours of sweat and every penny spent, and they plan to host the Mansion again in a couple of years.

Like the Old Testament sanctuary, which the children of Israel carried from camp to camp as they wandered 40 years in the wilderness, the replica spends a lot of time on the road. Messiah's Mansion is based at Oklahoma Academy, in Oklahoma City, but it is transported across the U.S., from Ventura, Calif., on the West Coast, to Cumberland, Md., on the East Coast, and then back again—nearly a dozen times a year.

Messiah's Mansion is surrounded by colorful tent-like walls, suggesting lighthearted play, but once inside the walls, the tour guides let visitors know that the sanctuary was very serious business. The modern guides used the many pieces of sanctuary furniture to bring God's plan of salvation to life. The Messiah's Mansion founders tried to include every item that was inside the original sanctuary, including the gold-painted lavar where Old Testament priests washed before performing sacred ceremonies, the seven-branched candlestick in the holy place and the altar of sacrifice. The modern sanctuary is built to scale and is intended to look just like the original did to the children of Israel.

The West Jordan church brought the sanctuary to Utah because they thought it would be of special interest and importance for their Mormon friends and neighbors—whose faith includes temples and daily rituals of their own.

By letting people experience the original sanctuary process through the guided tours, West Jordan church members hoped to demonstrate lessons that everyone could take away.

"Messiah's Mansion is one of the best ways to reach the community with an overview of Bible truth, said Pastor Dick Bullock: "the law, judgment, salvation, Christian living, and more. Most important is the message that the original temple and its rituals were a foretelling of the coming Messiah, and since Jesus has come, died and risen again, participation in temple rituals is no longer relevant or necessary," Bullock said.