Church members and guests from around the world are convening Saturday, Sept. 30 and Sunday, Oct. 1 in the Tabernacle on Temple Square in Salt Lake City and in thousands of other locations for the 165th Semi-Annual General Conference.

General sessions both days are at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. MDT. The priesthood session is at 6 p.m. MDT on Sept. 30.The conference, under the direction of President Gordon B. Hinckley and his counselors in the First Presidency, is being telecast to more than 3,000 meetinghouses in North America and the Caribbean. In addition, sessions are being transmitted via satellite to more than 1,200 cable television systems in the United States.

Church units or members in North America and Hawaii, with proper TV satellite reception capabilities, may receive the conference broadcasts in the following languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Cambodian, Cantonese, Haitian, Hmong, Korean, Laotian, Mandarin, Navajo, Portuguese, Samoan, Tongan and Vietnamese.

All general sessions are also being carried live on KSL-TV, Channel 5, in Salt Lake City and by tape delay on KBYU-TV, Channel 11, in Provo, Utah.

Speakers at the conference include President Hinckley, President Thomas S. Monson, President James E. Faust, members of the Quorum of the Twelve and other General Authorities and officers.

Music for the opening session Saturday morning is being provided by the Mormon Youth Chorus, with Robert C. Bowden conducting and Bonnie Goodliffe at the organ. Combined ward choirs from the Cottonwood Utah Region, conducted by Jay Campbell and with Linda Margetts at the organ, will sing during the Saturday afternoon session.

At the priesthood session Saturday evening, music will be furnished by the combined men from the Tabernacle Choir and Mormon Youth Chorus, directed by Jerold Ottley and Robert Bowden, with Richard Elliott as organist.

The Tabernacle Choir, with Donald Ripplinger and Craig Jessop conducting and Clay Christiansen and John Longhurst at the organ, will provide music for both Sunday sessions.

Non-English-speaking Church members seated in the Tabernacle, the Assembly Hall and North Visitors Center on Temple Square, the Legacy Theater in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, the Salt Lake Stake Center and local meetinghouses are able to listen to conference proceedings through interpreters in the following languages: Bulgarian, Cambodian, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian-Creole, Hmong, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Mandarin, Navajo, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Thai, Tongan and Vietnamese.

A special, 33-minute video presentation, "The Windows of Heaven," will be telecast over the Church satellite system in English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish between general sessions of conference on both days, beginning at 12:15 p.m. MDT each day.

Church units in areas of the world where the satellite and other transmissions are not available will receive videotapes of conference sessions. Asian languages are made available through distribution centers in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Bangkok, Jakarta and Seoul. Spanish and Portugese language tapes will be distributed throughout Latin America. Pacific island languages will be made available through various distribution centers, and Eastern European languages will be made available through the Frankfurt, Germany, Distribution Center.

This conference marks 50 years since the first general, unrestricted conference was held in the Tabernacle after World War II. Because of the war emergency, the building had been closed to the general public from March 1942 until September 1945. In-person attendance at conference during the war had been restricted to general, stake and ward priesthood leaders, although sessions were broadcast over radio.