SOUTH BAY / COVER STORY : Mormon Church Is Actively Seeking Members Among Asians and Other Local Immigrants

Mormon missionaries Yu-Chudn Cheng, an emigre from Taiwan, and Tyler Charlesworth, a burly Utah football player, slip off their shoes in the entryway and pad through Alex Chen’s Lomita home.

Within sight of a large image of Buddha, Cheng teaches about the Mormon church, showing Chen a series of charts, and gives him a Book of Mormon and pamphlets--all in Mandarin Chinese. Charlesworth doesn’t speak Mandarin, so he studies his own church literature while Cheng teaches.

Cheng, who converted to the church as a teen-ager, believes so fervently in his calling that he traveled to Utah to learn English so he could bring the faith to Mandarin-speaking people in the United States during his mission. But conversion was not without sacrifice. Cheng says that after he became a Mormon, his parents told him he “was no longer their son.”

Cheng and Charlesworth leave Chen with a promise to call again.

The missionaries spend six days a week combing neighborhoods in search of people willing to learn about the Mormon religion. About four or five people each month ask for information in Mandarin, a smAll sign of the larger trends that are remaking the church.

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.

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. Church membership worldwide has climbed from 5 million in 1982 to 9 million, according to church figures.

In Southern California, the trends have been mixed. The Mormon Church has seen some of its white membership age and retire to other regions of the country. But in the South Bay, the church has reached out to replace its departing white members with Latinos, Pacific Islanders, AsiaNs And others.

The church is organized into stakes, which 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.

Mormons in the South Bay are served bythe Torrance, Torrance North, Palos Verdes and Inglewood stakes. Church facilities house a variety of wards specifically for ethnic groups. On Sundays, wards use the facilities in shifts to accommodate services, Sunday school and leadership meetings.

South Bay Mormons worship each week in a church, but they must travel to West Los Angeles to the Mormon Temple for marriage and rites intended to seal spouses to each other and to their children in this life and for eternity. In California, the only other temples are in San Diego and in Oakland.

Although the weekly teachings are the same in every ward around the world, the church adapts by offering services in languages in use in local areas.

About 2 1/2 years ago, the Palos Verdes Ward established a Japanese branch that serves the families of Japanese auto manufacturers and others who want services in the language.

“It helps them to give them some reFerence point, to feel more accustomed to the American culture in general,” said Mark Tateuka, president of the Japanese branch.

Recognizing the influx of Japanese-speaking people into the area, South Bay church officials asked for help reaching them.

“We have made a request to the mission president that we need the ability to communicate to them in their own language,” said Martin Slater, president of the Torrance North Stake.

Another fast-growing segment of the church is Pacific Islanders. Titus K. May, 57, president of the Inglewood Stake, traces his roots to Hawaiian and Napoleonic royalty. Besides its English-speaking wards, Inglewood also has Tongan wards, where some men come to meetings in long robes and straw belts. Church officials say most of the Tongans converted on their home islands, where more than half of the population is Mormon.

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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 fall, and the church is planning to spend $4 million renovating the Hollywood Ward and the Wilshire Ward in Koreatown.

The church is also 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 six wards that worship in the Carson church include two Samoan units, a Spanish unit, a singles unit and two English units.

The Palos Verdes Stake has two English-speaking wards, a singles ward and Chinese, Japanese and Spanish branches.

Church officials say wards based on language are for the convenience of members, but that the ideal would be to hold all services in English.

“It would be my desire for complete integration, if the language abilities allowed it,” said Martin Slater, president of the Torrance North Stake.

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 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.”

Almost from its inception, the church began sending missionaries to Europe and to Mexico. In 1988 the church celebrated its 100th year in SAmoa. Since its inception, 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 infighting.

Their story, inscribed on golden tablets, was said to have been found in New York 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.

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Smith established for the church a strict code of conduct.

Mormons are expected to donate one-tenth of their income to the church, wear special undergarments with markings that symbolize a covenant with God and follow dietary rules banning alcohol, coffee, tea and tobacco, and urge that meat be consumed sparingly.

Although the church espoused polygamy in the early 19th Century, it officially discarded the practice in 1890.

Today, the church’s tight-knit 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 meet again in heaven.

The spirits of dead ancestors, identified by zealous genealogical research in the church’s databank of more than 2 billion names, are also offered a chance at glory, and those found worthy are promised resurrection as celestial beings, with the privilege to learn at God’s feet and eventually to rise to a godly status.

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.

Faabo Asi, a new bishop in one of Carson’s Samoan wards, attends to many of the same needs as a parish priest. He offers help and counseling, coordinates activities and tends to the spiritual needs of the church members.

“When you volunteer your service for something, you are blessed for it,” Asi says when asked about the time he devotes to ministry.

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

Keith J. Atkinson, a church spokesman who served a mission in Mexico, said the church’s hands-on approach has attracted many Latinos, who he believes find a sense of empowerment in the Mormon traditions that enable them to perform baptisms, blessings and other functions in their own families that in the other churches would be performed by a priest or minister.

Other Mormon converts are attracted by the church’s commitment to traditional family values and stringent moral guidelines.

After a young Mormon from Utah visited her family at their home in the Philippines, Tessie Castillo converted to the faith at the age of 17. She served her mission in Des Moines, Iowa, and now attends the singles ward in the Palos Verdes Stake.

Castillo believes the focus on familiar icons, strong family values and education made it easy for her to convert from Catholicism.

The church depends on members such as Castillo and Asi 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.

The church promotes a high birth rate among couples. Temple statues and church literature depict large families as the ideal, and women’s roles as mothers and homemakers are emphasized.

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

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.

Yu-Chudn Cheng, who learned English at the training center, has taught Mormon beliefs to Mandarin- and English-speaking people in Los Angeles for more than a year. Cheng said he often spends much of his time explaining the teachings relating to Jesus Christ because Taiwanese traditionally are Buddhist and don’t know much about Christ.

Mormon youngsters often start saving money when they are small to pay for their living expenses while serving on their missions. To ease the burden on families whose children are sent to high-cost areas such as Japan, the church now asks each missionary’s family to pay $350 per month in missionary support. Those who travel to low-cost areas contribute the same amount, effectively subsidizing the others.

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While serving on their missions, men and women 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.

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 apartments until 9:30 p.m.

More than 50,000 missionaries are stationed around the globe, church officials say. There are 212 missionaries in the Los Angeles Mission, which includes the South Bay.

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.”

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. “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.”

But Mormons say there is nothing fantastic about living by strict moral guidelines, emphasizing family and religion, and serving others as a way of life.

“I think that if everybody in the world were doing that, it would be a lot better,” Charlesworth said.

Times staff writers Diane Seo and Greg Miller contributed to this report.