More Mormons Flocking to the City

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.nydailynews.com

More Mormons flocking to city

Saturday, January 24th, 2004

As they go marching in, and in larger numbers than ever, the Latter-day Saints are making some serious New York moves.

Membership is growing at such a clip that the Mormons, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are popularly called, have launched an ambitious building program to provide enough worship and study space to meet the demand.

Their newest sanctuary, located in what once was a Catholic women's shelter near Union Square, was formally dedicated on Sunday. It is home to three separate congregations, including one composed solely of the deaf.

In the past five years in Manhattan alone, the church has built or broken ground for four new chapels, renovated and expanded its temple near Lincoln Center and rented another building for its Chinatown congregation. Other centers also are going up on Staten Island, and in the Bronx and New Rochelle. One new facility is in Woodside, Queens, on the site of what once was the Bulova Watch Co. factory.

"The growth is phenomenal," said Brent Belnap, president of the Manhattan stake [roughly equivalent to a diocese]. "A lot of it is because Mormons are settling in New York, which is a fairly recent development. Not long ago, New York was just a place they passed through on their way to somewhere else."

In Manhattan, he said, membership is up over the past decade from about 1,700 to more than 4,000. Overall, there are more than 25,000 Mormons in the five boroughs, double the figure from a decade ago.

"It doesn't sound impressive until you start thinking about it," said Belnap, a lawyer for Citigroup who, like all Mormon leaders, is an unpaid volunteer. He was appointed - "called," in church parlance - in 1997, after serving as a bishop (congregational leader). As stake president, he oversees the temporal and spiritual activities of all facilities in Manhattan. There are separate bishops for Brooklyn and Westchester County, whose purview includes the Bronx.

Scott Trotter, spokesman for the stake, said all construction is dictated by need. "We build chapels where members are," he said, "not in hopes that they will come."

The new chapel on W. 15th St. is a good example. Until it opened, Mormons living and working in lower Manhattan traveled north to the Lincoln Square temple to worship or study.

The chapel is located in what until three years ago was a Catholic convent and shelter for homeless and poor women. The four-story building was owned by a 100-year-old order, the Sisters of Reparation of the Congregation of Mary. But it was better known as St. Zita's Home, because the founder of the order, Irish immigrant nurse Ellen O'Keefe, had adopted St. Zita, the 13th century housemaid who became patron saint of domestic servants, as her special protector.

There were only two nuns left in the convent behind St. Zita's Home when the order decided to leave. They and the four other remaining members of the order now live in the motherhouse in Monsey, Rockland County.

In a renovation project that cost "several" million dollars, a fifth floor was added to the shelter building - to provide for a 185-seat chapel, where three separate services are held on Sundays, starting at 10 a.m.

One of its three congregations, also called "wards" or "branches," is limited to singles. That's an important element in life for unmarried Mormons, who, because they do not drink, may find it difficult to meet and mingle socially.

"Before this job, I was the bishop of a singles congregation with 400 members," said Belnap, who is married and a father of five. "That was a real experience."

The first Mormon congregation in the city was organized in 1837, but services were held in private homes and rented halls for decades. It was not until 1919 that the church built a chapel and mission home, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the church's first buildings east of the Mississippi in 70 years.

"It's funny," said Trotter, "but most New Yorkers don't realize that the church began in New York." In fact, it was founded in 1830 in western New York, after Joseph Smith reported the revelations that became the Book of Mormon. "So it's not that we're back, it's that we're still here."

[Kris]

April 22, 2004

Mormon Church Gets Ready to Open Its Newest Temple, Near Lincoln Center

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

A legacy of misunderstanding and persecution has bred a keen instinct for public relations in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And so, in what has become something of a ritual itself, the Mormon church opens every newly built temple to the public. Then it shuts the doors.

The latest viewing takes place next month at a new temple - the 119th in the world and the only one between Washington and Boston - carved out of an existing Mormon-owned building across the street from Lincoln Center, at 65th Street and Columbus Avenue. After an open house from May 8 to June 5 and the dedication of the temple on June 13, only Mormons - and only those Mormons deemed worthy - will be allowed to enter what are considered the most sacred precincts of the faith.

After 16 months of work, the temple is nearly complete. An army of workers, including skilled Mormon craftsmen who travel the world to work on new temples, are painting walls, installing carpet, and adding gilt edges to architectural details.

"We view the temple literally as the house of the Lord," said Scott Trotter, the church's spokesman in New York. "We believe it is the most sacred place on earth."

Sunday services and weekday activities take place in Mormon meeting houses, or chapels, which are open to outsiders. There are 78 in New York and its suburbs for the 42,000 metropolitan-area members, double the number 10 years ago.

Until now, New York's growing Mormon population had no place to partake of the highest forms of worship - receiving "endowments," or the church's teachings, contemplation in a light-bathed Celestial Room, "sealing" ceremonies for married couples or their children, and the baptism of the dead, a central Mormon tenet.

Mormonism has deep roots in the city. Joseph Smith, the religion's founding prophet, traveled here to preach two years after organizing the church in 1830. (He wrote home that "the buildings are truly great and wonderful, to the astonishing of every beholder," but that the people had "disagreeable" countenances.)

Worldwide, Mormonism is one of the world's fastest-growing religions, counting nearly 12 million members. The number of temples has more than doubled in the past four years alone, the result of a recent policy of building them where the people are, instead of drawing people to Mormon centers like Salt Lake City.

The church is not seeking New York converts through the open house, Mr. Trotter said. "There are so many misconceptions about us out there. It's more of a way to reach out and say, 'Come in and understand us.' "

The most obvious misconception, of course, is that Mormons practice polygamy; the church officially banned the practice in 1890. Mr. Trotter also said that many people think "weird things are going on" in temples. And the view persists, he acknowledged, that Mormons are not Christian, which he said was false.

During a preview tour, Mr. Trotter telegraphed the sensitivities. He stressed the eternal, sacred nature of a sealed marriage between one man and one woman, and referred often to the central nature of Jesus in the Mormon faith.

Mormons believe the angel Moroni led Joseph Smith to golden tablets in Palmyra, N.Y., which contained the teachings of the prophet Mormon. They believe Smith translated and published the teachings as the Book of Mormon in 1830. The book recounts the migration to North America of a group of Israelites who are believed to be the ancestors of Native Americans, and the resurrected Jesus' role in preaching to them.

Mr. Trotter described the simple marriage sealing ceremonies and pointed out the large tiled font where youngsters stand in for the baptizing of dead souls. He also talked of teachings imparted in two "instructional rooms," one a mini-auditorium, with murals depicting a forest grove and river valley, where the faithful watch an inspirational video.

But Mr. Trotter declined to discuss other aspects of the endowments, which Mormons and non-Mormon chroniclers of the church have said include the bestowal of sacred names and sacred undergarments, and ritual anointing.

"It's just understood that we don't talk about them in public," he said. A non-Mormon photographer was not allowed to take pictures inside.

Once past the front desk, a templegoer is immediately confronted with a three-paneled, back-lighted stained-glass window showing Jesus with two apostles. Worshipers turn right to take an elevator to changing rooms where they don white garments and shoes or slippers. The halls are lined with thick carpeting, oak doors and elaborate molding.

The décor has the flavor of vaguely French neo-Classical opulence. Door fixtures are topped with a Statue of Liberty flame, reflecting the custom of incorporating regional design elements. Lightly veined white marble from New Hampshire covers some floors.

Rooms grow brighter as a visitor ascends to the highest point, the Celestial Room with its 24-foot-high ceiling, stately armchairs and couches and decorative balcony. Giant mirrors face each other, signifying eternity. Dale Jolley, a Mormon contractor from Salt Lake City who has worked on 55 temples, was tracing gold leaf on the elaborate column capitals and corbels in the room.

"I'm still not used to the idea I get this opportunity," he said.

Stained-glass windows depict trees of life. Interior walls have been built six inches away from the original walls to create utter silence.

"We build as well as men can build here," said Elder Milton Farr, a church construction manager imported from Fort Thomas, Ariz.

The 20,630-square-foot temple includes a grand hallway, and a baptismal font that appears to rest atop 12 fiberglass oxen, three at each compass point, a reference to the Old Testament description of Solomon's temple.

The initial cost estimate was $10 million, Mr. Farr said, but the expense was probably far higher once additions were made. Mormon officials are deeply reluctant to discuss money, given the church's reputation for great wealth and power.

"We give the finest that we have to the Lord," Mr. Trotter said.

Tickets are available through www.lds.org/reservations , or by calling (718) 672-0326 or 0487. Mr. Trotter said walk-ins would be accommodated if there was room.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

Mormonism Takes Hold In Harlem

BY JAMAL WATSON
November 30, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/23699

Beulah Philson has long been a devout Baptist. At a young age, she made a promise to her parents that she would never abandon her religious roots.

But on a recent Sunday morning, Ms. Philson, 56, made the trek across town to fellowship at Harlem's newly built five-story Mormon Temple on the corner of 128th Street and Lenox Avenue.

After years of trying one church service after another, Ms. Philson is taking a chance on something brand new.

"The black Baptist church just isn't doing anything for me," Ms. Philson, who was a member of four different black churches in Harlem before deciding to call it quits about two months ago, said. "I want to see if the Mormon Church has anything to offer."

Ms. Philson admits she knows little about the Mormon Church, but she said she heard a while back that the famed Motown singer Gladys Knight is an active member of the fold.

Regardless, Ms. Philson decided to visit the meetinghouse in Harlem only after she was approached by several Mormon missionaries a few weeks ago while waiting to catch the bus along Harlem's busy 125th Street thoroughfare.

"They were very friendly," she said. "They told me that I had an open invitation to come to their new building anytime I chose to visit."

While Mormonism over the past decade has become the fastest-growing religion in America, it has especially taken hold in black urban areas like Harlem, where black parishioners say they are actively looking for an alternative to traditional black protestant teachings.

Each Sunday, scores of African Americans bypass well-known black churches to make it to the 11 a.m. church service. At a time when church services tend to be segregated, the Mormons are celebrating the widespread diversity among their congregation.

Mormon officials tell me that in poorer and working-class black neighborhoods, they are providing the social services that black churches used to offer. And the locals, they say, are coming.

Still, if anyone knows the history of the Mormon Church, one has to wonder why African Americans would be attracted to the church's teachings. Until 1978, the church subscribed to the belief that blacks were spiritually inferior to whites and should be excluded from priesthood, a position achieved by most Mormon men.

Organized in 1830, the church also once taught that blacks were the descendants of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who was banished after murdering his brother Abel, and of Ham, the son of Noah who broke a long taboo when he looked at the nude body of his drunken father. The "curse of Ham" was Noah's decision to condemn into slavery the descendants of Ham's son Canaan. Black folks were supposed to fall under this lineage.

When told of the history of the church, Ms. Philson didn't seem bothered. "This kind of talk is nothing new," she said. "Good white Protestants enslaved my people and used religion to justify slavery. I measure the church on where it stands now, not on where it was 25 years ago."

In 1998, it was rumored that leaders at the church's Salt Lake City headquarters were considering offering an official apology for its discriminatory past, but that apology never came.

The church, which has no paid clergy - it depends on lay members to lead worship and perform such rituals as baptisms, ordinations, and infant blessings - is expanding into black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Detroit.

African-American Mormons have created Web sites, online chat rooms, and blogs, where they seem to reconcile the church's discriminatory past with a resolve to help transform it for the better.

Quiet as it's kept, in communities like Harlem, where the black Baptists and Methodists Church have long been able to draw in locals each Sunday, there is concern. Ms. Philson hasn't made the conversion yet. She has recently been perusing the Book of Mormon and has been surfing online to find out how the doctrine differs from the traditional religious teachings she inherited from her parents many years ago.

"I've got to do some more homework," she said. "But I have not closed my ears to the Mormons. I may have finally found what I've been looking for."