SAN GABRIEL VALLEY / COVER STORY : Diversity Amid Devotion : Mormon Missionaries Seek Asian Americans as Church Sheds Its All-White Image

Steve Richardson recalls feeling more puzzled than excited when he opened his missions service letter from Salt Lake City.

The 20-year-old Texan had no qualms about his assignment--telling Chinese people in the San Gabriel Valley about the Mormon gospel.

What perplexed him was the language he had to speak: Mandarin.

“I didn’t even know what Mandarin was,” Richardson said. “I knew what Chinese was but I didn’t know the dialects. The whole thing was pretty new (to me).”

Fourteen months into his two-year mission, the boy who grew up learning Spanish in Alvin, Tex., now speaks, reads and studies Mandarin daily in his Alhambra apartment. He and his partner, David Wells, 20, of Utah, know enough of the language to share their beliefs about Jesus Christ and the Book of Mormon with much of the Chinese American community.

Dressed in the standard Mormon missionary outfit--white short-sleeve shirt and plain-print tie--the two spend six days each week roaming through Alhambra and Monterey Park, looking for Chinese homes to visit and hoping to win some souls for the church.

“After a while, you just figure out which doors are Chinese or not,” Richardson said. “You look for shoes, Chinese signs on the door, characters.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--a once-homogenous entity best known outside its ranks for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Brigham Young University and the Osmond family--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 the San Gabriel Valley and other areas, the church has reached out to replace its departing white members with Latinos, Chinese, Koreans and others.

Such 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.”

The San Gabriel Valley has about 26,000 members among its seven Mormon “stakes,” which are based in Pasadena, Arcadia, Glendora, La Verne, Covina, Hacienda Heights and Walnut. Stakes are regional units made up of congregations called wards, which typically have 400 to 600 members, and branches, which range from a dozen members to several hundred.

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Although whites still make up a majority of Mormon membership in the valley at 78%, the proportion of Spanish-speaking followers has climbed to 20% and speakers of Asian languages to 2%, said Brad Foster, president of the Arcadia Mission, and Reid Gunnell, Foster’s assistant.

A more significant figure that Foster and Gunnell turn to is the ratio of converts. Just two years ago, 70% of new converts in the valley were white, 25% Latino and 5% Asian, Foster said.

Now whites make up half of those converted, 35% or 40% are Latino and the rest are Asian, Foster said.

And among Asian Mormons, those of Chinese origin lead the flock.

There were no Chinese-language services in the valley 13 years ago. But in the summer of 1981, church leaders commissioned Chinese American members to form the first branch in Rosemead, where services and programs are held in Mandarin. Two others have since sprung up in Hacienda Heights and Arcadia; Koreans also have a branch in Hacienda Heights. Vietnamese Mormons join the Chinese in Rosemead for Sunday services.

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“At that time, they saw a need,” recalled Charles Chen, who served as president of the Chinese branch in Rosemead when it first opened. “Regardless of how many members . . . they just told me to go ahead and organize one. After the second meeting, we had 20-some people.

“We have grown quite a lot. Every time we have 100 members, we split out to a different branch.”

Gunnell also sees potential growth among the Chinese.

“The Chinese people, a lot of them are interested in our message,” Gunnell said. “They come from a very different background, from the standpoint of religion.”

To keep up with growth, the church has poured millions of dollars into its Southern California facilities, erecting a new chapel in Duarte and renovating other buildings in the valley.

Built in 1990, the 15,600-square-foot Duarte chapel at 1452 Royal Oaks Drive features a connecting hall for sports activities, banquets and dances. It also accommodates services for 200 Spanish-speaking and 400 English-speaking members, said Mel Reeves, president of the Arcadia stake.

The San Gabriel Valley’s Chinese branches, which range from 40 to 170 members, share facilities with English-speaking branches, though they eventually would like to acquire a building.

“We have talked about it many years,” Chen said. “The qualifications to have your own building are tougher” than in Taiwan or other Asian countries.

The local changes are only part of an increasingly diverse Mormon church. Almost from its inception, the church began sending missionaries to Europe and 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.

He added: “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 Jesus 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 New York 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.

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 “sparingly.”

Families gather one night each week for a “home evening” devoted to prayer, study and activities 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, scattered across Southern California. Classes, worship and meetings can fill up to 10 hours a week.

Asian American converts in the valley say they were drawn to the church’s commitment to traditional family values and stringent moral guidelines.

“A lot of love at home. The parents and the kids seem to be very harmonious--and that’s very important,” said Jiin-Jen Lee, reflecting on what drew him to the Mormon faith 30 years ago.

Lee, a civil engineering professor at USC, was a student at Utah State University in 1964 when Mormon missionaries introduced him to the religion. His parents practiced ancestral worship--a popular Asian religion--but Mormonism offered answers to Lee’s questions about life and family.

A more recent convert, Carry Tan of Duarte, had been a Buddhist for 40 years. But when her husband died of cancer 3 1/2 years ago, she could not find solace in Buddhism. Rather, solace came knocking on her door in the form of two Bible-carrying missionaries.

“The Buddhists always tell you you’re poor because you’re no good,” said Tan, a part-time housekeeper and the mother of three. “Who will judge you for being good or bad? You’ll never get the answer.

“But in our church, they are very clear. Jesus will judge you,” she said. “If you have a poor life, you can learn Mormonism. If you do your best, eventually your life will be better.”

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

Mormon children are groomed for missionary work early on.

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 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, which offers courses in 44 languages and trains about 3,300 missionaries each month.

Like virtually all their missionary counterparts, the Alhambra-based Richardson and Wells team receives no financial support from the church during their assignments. Instead, they and their parents set aside $8,400 to cover missionary expenses for two years, which include room and board.

While serving their missions, Richardson and Wells 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 three phone calls home per year--on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Christmas.

They rise at 6:30 a.m., study religion for a few hours and hit the sidewalk by 10:30 a.m. Aside from lunch or dinner breaks, they are not permitted to return to their apartment until 9:30 p.m.

Richardson and Wells are two of 184 missionaries in the Arcadia mission, which stretches from Pomona to Glendale. Of those, six are assigned to bring in Chinese converts, another six to Koreans, two to Vietnamese, 70 to Latinos and 100 to whites.

One Latino convert was brought up by her parents as a Catholic, became a Pentecostal Christian in 1992 and abandoned her Assembly of God church in Orange County after her divorce.

“I met the missionaries,” said Dorothy Marie Bustamante Bandy, 30, of Monrovia. “They were visiting my sister, and they were very helpful to me.”

After tasting aspects of each religion, Bandy said she’s confident that the Mormon faith stands out above the others.

“There was no structure in the Pentecostal church,” said Bandy, the mother of a 6-year-old boy. “Anyone can walk in and serve in the church.”

“In the Latter-day Saints church, you need to be in attendance and you pray about it--there is a procedure.”

Church members are helping Bandy find employment.

“The structure of the (Mormon) church is not to take and take,” she said. “They give and give.”

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,” says 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.”

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, though the decision 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.

Nor has the church’s efforts within the Asian community caused problems among Buddhist leaders in the San Gabriel Valley.

“We are not concerned about other religions,” said the Rev. Man Tau of Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights. Since its opening in 1988, the temple at 3456 S. Glenmark Drive has amassed 10,000 Chinese, Japanese and Korean members.

Unlike the Mormon creed of spreading the Gospel, Buddhists refrain from evangelizing the world and instead encourage individuals to seek their own paths to Buddhism.

“We don’t go out for family visits,” Tau said. “We are strictly forbidden to convert people to believe. This is not the right way.”

Times staff writers Mathis Chazanov and Diane Seo contributed to this story.