COVER STORY : Mormons Reach Out and Grow

Tony Henderson and Mikael Black, 20-year-old Mormons from Utah, remember trembling with excitement as they held their sealed letters from Salt Lake City summoning them to serve missions.

Both had taken three years of German in high school and thought the odds were pretty good they’d get to use it.

Then they opened the letters. Destination: Long Beach. Language: Khmer (the predominant language of Cambodia).

“I was kind of shocked because I didn’t know there were Cambodians in the United States,” Henderson said.

Now in the middle of their two-year missions for the church, they spend six days a week combing Long Beach apartment neighborhoods is search of Cambodians willing to learn about the Mormon faith.

Wearing white short-sleeve shirts with plain-print ties, Henderson and Black look for tell-tale signs of Cambodian households: rice embedded in lawns, tassels hanging from rear-view mirrors of cars, sandals stacked outside doorways.

Their objective, Henderson said, “is to help bring souls to Christ.”

Once a homogeneous church best known outside its ranks for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Brigham Young University and the Osmond family, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is expanding and diversifying at a rapid pace in Southern California and around the globe.

Mormon church membership grew by 22% in the United States between 1982 and 1991, while some mainstream Protestant denominations reported declines of up to 40%, according to the National Council of Churches. Mormon church membership worldwide has climbed from 5 million in 1982 to 9 million currently, according to church figures. And for the first time in the church’s 164-year history, half of the world’s Mormons now live outside the United States, officials say.

In Southern California, the trends have been mixed. The church has seen some of its white membership age and retire to other regions of the country. But in Long Beach and other local areas, the church has reached out to replace its departing white members with Latinos, Samoans, Tongans, Cambodians and others.

Within the 4,000-member Long Beach East Stake, a Cambodian branch that didn’t exist 13 years ago has nearly 800 baptized members and picks up 50 converts a year, Mormon leaders say. (Stakes are regional units of the church comprising congregations called wards, which typically have 400 to 600 members, and branches, which range in size from a dozen members to several hundred.)

A neighboring unit that covers the western section of the city, the 3,600-member Long Beach Stake, includes two Samoan wards, one Tongan ward, a Spanish-speaking ward and a Spanish-speaking branch. Only four of the stake’s nine congregations are English-speaking. Robert Ward, president of the stake, said its membership was 95% white 40 years ago when he was a Polytechnic High teen-ager entering the church’s priesthood. “We really are multicultural, and it’s great,” Ward said.

To keep up with the growth, the church has poured millions of dollars into its Southern California facilities.

Four years ago, the church opened a $4-million, 50,000-square-foot worship center at 228th and Main streets in Carson. The Huntington Park West Stake center is expected to open this summer, and the church is planning to spend $4 million renovating the Hollywood Ward and the Wilshire Ward in Koreatown.

The church also is purchasing an eight-acre parcel at 3000 E. South St. in Lakewood. Church officials say plans for the site may include a building that could house as many as eight congregations.

The recently renovated stake center at 3701 Elm Ave. in Long Beach is equipped to translate services and meetings into several languages. While leaders speak from the pulpit in the main chapel, Samoans, Tongans and Latinos in the audience wear headphones and listen to translators who sit in nearby rooms and watch the proceedings on television monitors.

The demographic changes are in striking contrast to a common perception that the Mormon church is a predominantly white church that has sought to stay that way. After all, the church denied its priesthood to blacks for more than a century until a “divine revelation” in 1978 ended such discrimination and opened the door to “every faithful, worthy man in the church.”

But researchers say the common perception of the Mormon church is increasingly outdated.

Almost from its inception, the church began sending missionaries to Europe and to Mexico. Since then, the church has ventured into 149 countries, “every country that allows it to come in,” said J. Gordon Melton, director of the Santa Barbara-based Institute for the Study of American Religion. “Today, Mormons would be among the five most ethnically and culturally diverse churches going.”

The Book of Mormon, the pillar of the church’s faith, tells the story of immigrants from the Middle East who founded elaborate civilizations in the Americas. Visited by Christ after the Resurrection, they prospered for centuries, only to disappear after falling victim to evil ways and fighting among themselves.

Their story, inscribed on golden tablets, was said to have been found by Joseph Smith in 1823, guided by a vision of an angel named Moroni. It is an image of Moroni, covered in gold leaf, that can be seen holding a trumpet atop the church’s temples around the world.

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Smith established for the church a strict code of conduct that has been modified over the years but continues to place a large number of demands on its members.

Mormons are expected to donate a tenth of their income to the church, wear special undergarments decorated with markings that symbolize a covenant with God and follow dietary rules known as the Word of Wisdom, which bans alcohol, coffee, tea and tobacco, and urges that meat be consumed only sparingly.

Families gather one night each week for a “home evening” devoted to prayer, study and other activities that can range from board games to night skiing. The church teaches that it is important for families to get along because they will spend eternity together in heaven.

Devout Mormons pray, study and socialize every Sunday at chapels, or meeting houses. Classes, worship and meetings can fill up to 10 hours a week, with volunteer pastors, known as bishops, and higher-ranking church officials putting in much more time.

With no professional clergy, church services are led by members of the congregation. Church members can baptize their own children or spouses, they can practice healing rites and all male members of the church are eligible for its priesthood.

Manuel Vasquez, president of a Latino branch in Long Beach, says such opportunities for participation didn’t exist in the Catholic faith he abandoned 20 years ago.

“In this church the priesthood is for every man; there, it’s only for one,” said Vasquez, 64. “I can bless my sons and I can bless other people. This is the true church.”

Keith J. Atkinson, a church spokesman who served a mission in Mexico, said the church’s hands-on

approach has attracted many Latinos who have found the Catholic faith too distant. Other Mormon converts are attracted by the church’s commitment to traditional family values and stringent moral guidelines.

Matt Chheng, who was a member of a Cambodian branch in Long Beach until he moved to South Carolina recently, said his parents joined the church when he was a child because they wanted him to have a strict upbringing. Chheng, 24, said he was skeptical at first but came to appreciate the sense of purpose and direction instilled by the church.

“I know where I’m going,” he said. “I know I’m not supposed to do drugs, drink a beer--that kind of thing. I know what’s right and wrong.”

Chheng taught those values to a new generation of Cambodians joining the church in Long Beach. He was the branch’s first nonwhite to be appointed Young Men’s President, who oversees the branch’s youth activities.

Chheng, an insurance salesman, said his colleagues at work often were surprised to learn he is a Mormon. Some wondered how a Cambodian can relate to a church in which the vast majority of leaders, including the president of the Cambodian branch, are white.

“We’re all His children; we just happened to have come from a different part of the world,” Chheng said. Joseph Smith could just as easily have been Cambodian, Chheng said, “if it was supposed to be that way.”

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The church depends on members such as Vasquez and Chheng to be examples of Mormonism’s virtues. Church leaders say many converts are introduced to the church by Mormon neighbors.

But casual contacts alone do not account for the church’s rapid expansion. Clues to understanding that phenomenon lie in the church’s structure and tenets.

When it was a fledgling religious movement in the early 19th Century, the church espoused polygamy. Though justification was said to be found in the Old Testament, the practice had the pragmatic impact of expanding the ranks of the church.

Polygamy was officially discarded in 1890, but the church continues to promote a high birth rate even today. Temple statues and church literature depict large families as the ideal, and women’s roles as mothers and homemakers are emphasized.

To encourage marriage, the Long Beach East Stake has established a ward for single members. Stake President S. Lynn Richards proudly points out that since its inception 4 1/2 years ago, there have been 35 marriages in the 130-member ward.

Worship centers equipped with everything from kitchens to indoor basketball courts are used for numerous social gatherings and are loaned out to local organizations such as the Boy Scouts of America. Through these activities, potential converts are continually introduced to the church and its members.

Perhaps the most effective mechanism is the church’s missionary operation.

Mormon children are groomed for missionary work from the moment they’re old enough to learn the words to “I Hope They Call Me on a Mission” in the Mormon hymnal.

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By the time they are 19, the age at which they are eligible to serve, few Mormon men consider doing anything else. They send letters to Salt Lake City stating their willingness to serve and wait for marching orders. Women are eligible at 21 to serve 18-month missions and now constitute 22% of the missionary roster, church officials say.

If a foreign language is required, missionaries are trained at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah. The center offers courses in 44 languages and trains about 3,300 missionaries each month, church officials say.

Virtually all missionaries are expected to cover their own expenses, and the church instructs families to prepare for this obligation.

For instance, Henderson and Black, the missionaries working in Long Beach’s Cambodian community, rely on the $8,400 each of their families was advised to set aside.

While serving their missions, Henderson and Black are expected to abide by rules of conduct that make everyday Mormon standards seem relaxed: no dating, no television, no radio, no movies, no family visits and no more than two phone calls home per year.

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They rise at 6 a.m., study religion for a few hours, hit the sidewalk by 9:30 a.m. and are not permitted to return to their apartment until 9:30 p.m.

They travel by foot and bicycle through dangerous sections of the city. A shooting took place behind their Washington Place apartment just weeks ago, and they say a police officer once sized them up and asked sarcastically, “Is it your job to be victimized?”

But the young men say that their dress code, the same as for their numerous predecessors, makes them instantly recognizable and apparently unappealing targets to neighborhood hoodlums.

“They know why we’re there,” Black said. “Two white guys in white shirts and ties--you stick out like a sore thumb.”

Henderson and Black are among 50,000 missionaries stationed around the globe, church officials say. There are 212 missionaries in the Los Angeles Mission, which includes Long Beach and most Southeast cities.

The reaction of other local religious leaders to Mormonism’s tenacious campaign ranges from grudging admiration to restrained irritation.

The Mormon missionary activity is “far more aggressive than anything we’re doing,” said Father Gregory Coiro, a spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. “I don’t want to say being aggressive is bad. Maybe we should be saying we’re not aggressive enough.”

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The Catholic Church has begun strengthening its ties to the ethnic communities of Southern California, he said. The St. Thomas Aquinas parish in Monterey Park, for example, was recently designated a Chinese-speaking evangelical center. The move was intended to offer a home parish to the region’s Chinese population, although the decision also angered a large segment of the parish’s predominantly Latino membership.

But Coiro said he does not believe the Catholic church’s Latino stronghold is being eroded by the Mormon church.

The Mormon church is “one of the many religions, sects and cults that are out there trying to attract people,” he said. “The best way for a Catholic to remain a Catholic is to remain well versed in what it is that makes us Catholic.”

He also said: “Mormons ask people to believe in some very fantastic things, like they can become the gods of their own planets. Someone who’s well grounded in Christianity is not going to join a religion that says you can become God.”

Most Cambodians joining the Mormon church have converted from Buddhism. But Kong Chhean, a monk at a temple at 2100 W. Willow St. in Long Beach, said Mormonism is not seen as an enemy or a rival.

Buddhism is an open-minded, passive faith that does not forbid its followers to explore other philosophies, Chhean said.

“On Sunday they are going to church, and on Cambodian New Year they come to temple,” Chhean said.

Chhean’s only complaint about Mormon missionaries is one of the most common.

“They shouldn’t go from house to house,” Chhean said, “because we are busy doing our housework.”

On the Cover: Elder Mikael Black, left, and Elder Tony Henderson, 20-year-old Mormon missionaries from Utah, pray with Heng Heing in her home as they seek converts in Long Beach’s large Cambodian immigrant community.

Times staff writer Diane Seo contributed to this article.