More than 100,000 Latter-day Saints converging on downtown Salt Lake City this weekend will help usher in a new era of worldwide church growth symbolized by the huge new Conference Center, which yet remains far too small to hold more than a tiny fraction of their fellow members.

The 170th Annual General Conference opens to record numbers who will hold tickets to the new 21,000-seat auditorium. But millions of other members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will tune in to the five historic sessions via satellite, TV, radio and the Internet.

Such widespread access to the words spoken by those accepted as "prophets, seers and revelators" would have taxed the most vivid imagination of thousands of frontier Saints who gathered nearly 133 years ago, on Oct. 6, 1867, for the first sessions of general conference to be held in the newly completed Tabernacle on Temple Square.

Previous to that, general conferences — the first of which was held in Fayette, N.Y., on June 9, 1830, — had been convened wherever was deemed most appropriate by church leaders.

Minutes of the first conference in the Tabernacle record that "no building could be constructed large enough to hold the Saints." The Deseret News reported that "an hour before the appointed time for conference commencing, the immense building was crowded in every part, great numbers being unable to obtain admission."

Another report said that "long before the hour named for the opening of the gates on the south and west side of the Temple Block, the people began to assemble, and by 9 o'clock there was such a dense crowd around these entrances, that there was no passage along the sidewalks. The streets were also filled with carriages, wagons and horses, indicating that there had been an early and large in-gathering that morning from the country, in addition to the vast numbers that had reached the city on the days preceding."

And so it is today, though the crowds come by airline, car and light rail.

Officials reported in March that more than 370,000 requests for tickets to the conference were received from church members worldwide. With nearly 11 million members in 160 nations, the LDS Church has more than quadrupled in size since 1970, just four years after the Tabernacle celebrated its 100th birthday.

That exponential growth is "our greatest challenge," according to President Gordon B. Hinckley, who announced plans to build the new center during general conference in April 1996.

Acknowledging then that no building could ever be large enough to accommodate burgeoning church membership, he cited a desire to house growing numbers of Saints who come to Salt Lake City from all over the globe to attend the semiannual sessions, where church leaders' sermons expound the faith's theology.

Of the massive construction project, President Hinckley said, "It is a bold step we are taking. But this boldness is in harmony with the tremendous outreach of the church across the world. We have no desire to outdo Brigham Young or his wish only to build on the tremendous foundation which President Young laid in pioneering this marvelous work here in the valleys of the West."

Built as "a gift to the Master," that "will stand for as long as the Earth lasts," the building's completion in the year 2000 is considered a significant milestone in the history of a church that claims to be Christ's original organization restored to the Earth. Complete with 12 apostles and a commission to "go into all the world" and preach the gospel, that effort now includes some 65,000 full-time missionaries worldwide.

Instruction for the church as a whole has been the purpose of general conference from the early history of the church, and the reason its leaders put such emphasis on constructing buildings in which sermons can be readily heard.

While it was built entirely on the ingenuity of early pioneer craftsmen, the Tabernacle's acoustical quality has long been recognized to rival many more modern structures. Temple Square hosts have long impressed visitors by dropping a pin at the pulpit to create a sound that is audible to those in the last row of pews.

Yet quality sound has never been the sole objective. The message conveyed has been the major focus. "When I think of the vast volume of precious truth which has been proclaimed from this stand, I feel very small and weak within it," said President Stephen L. Richards, first counselor to former church President David O. McKay in speaking from the Tabernacle.

Indeed, LDS leaders have always been determined to share "the word" with the world. While the church won't release how much the building cost, news reports have estimated about $240 million.

Believed to be the largest auditorium for worship in the world, the Conference Center was constructed with state-of-the-art sound and digital, high-definition broadcast capability. It is "built as well as we know how to build in this season of the history of the world," President Hinckley said, to "serve the purposes of the kingdom of God."

Like its landmark predecessor on Temple Square, the new building will "ring with the voices of the prophets" to be "carried across the world to the nations of the Earth as this church rolls on and continues to grow," President Hinckley said.

To those unacquainted with the church's mission, that kind of spiritual and financial resolve may seem puzzling. But the quest advances the prophecy of church founder Joseph Smith, that Latter-day Saints would one day take their restored gospel to "every nation, kindred, tongue and people."

The Tabernacle, and now the Conference Center, are perhaps Mormonism's largest visual symbols of just how serious they are about doing so.