Once again, Church members from across the globe filled the Conference Center to capacity in each of the five sessions of the 180th Annual General Conference. Over the past decade, conferencegoers have grown accustomed to listening to the words of prophets and apostles inside the spacious yet inviting granite, 21,000-seat forum.

Ten years ago, on April 1, 2000, members attending the opening session of the 170th edition of general conference were witnesses to history. The Church had a new structure to call home. In the first address in the new building, President Gordon B. Hinckley spoke of the magnificence of the Conference Center that opened, appropriately, at the beginning of a new millennium.

"I know of no comparable structure built primarily as a hall of worship that is so large and will seat so many," he said. "It is beautiful in its design, in its appointments and in its wonderful utility."

The Church president thanked conferencegoers for their enthusiasm for the new meeting place, adding he hoped "that we shall have a full house at every conference in the future."

With a keen eye for quality construction, President Hinckley spoke of the craftsmanship utilized to build the Conference Center constructed to the north of Temple Square. The structure, he said in his address, is faced with stone from the same quarry as the Salt Lake Temple, even carrying the same blemishes as that granite.

"The interior is beautiful and wonderfully impressive. It is huge and it is constructed in such a way that nothing obstructs the view of the speaker. The carpets, the marble floor, the decorated walls, the handsome hardware, the wonderful wood all bespeak utility, with a touch of elegance."

Later in his address, President Hinckley spoke of his personal, "even a little sentimental" contribution to the new Conference Center. Nearly four decades earlier, he had planted a black walnut tree on his family farm. The tree died a short time before the opening of the center. Elder Ben B. Banks — a member of the Seventy with a background in the lumber business — along with Elder Banks' sons suggested that the wood from the dead tree be used to build the Conference Center pulpit.

Just as President Hinckley had done a decade ago, President Thomas S. Monson and his fellow prophets and apostles gathered inside the Conference Center and testified of Christ as they stood at a pulpit fashioned from a black walnut tree. — Jason Swensen

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