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Spreading the word
Young Mormon missionaries in Sonoma County strengthen their faith by sharing message with others
Mormon missionaries Joshua Marsh, left, and Darion Bevan, right, talk with Abby Molina about the book of Mormon as they walk in Howarth Park in Santa Rosa. Molina politely told the two 20-year-olds that he was studying Buddhism.
KENT PORTER / THE PRESS DEMOCRATPublished: Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 9:13 p.m.
Darion Bevan and Joshua Marsh willingly go to bed at 10:30 every night.
For a couple of healthy 20-year-old bachelors, that might seem peculiar in an age of electronic distractions and post-midnight entertainment.
Bevan and Marsh share a modest east Santa Rosa apartment furnished with two desks, two beds and little else. There's no TV, stereo or computer, but there are workout weights in one bedroom and a picture of Jesus Christ on the front door.
Sixteen hours a day, six days a week starting at 6:30 a.m., they are missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, committed to spreading the word of a 180-year-old American-born faith that counts 13.8 million members worldwide.
In their distinctive dark suits, white shirts and ties, Mormon missionaries such as Bevan and Marsh promote the gospel of Christ expounded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, a rural New York farmer the faithful believe was a prophet. Church scriptures describe the Messiah's post-crucifixion appearance before an ancient American people and foretell Christ's return to an earthly kingdom based in Missouri.
Unfamiliar to many and deemed outlandish by some, Mormon theology has circled the globe, with church membership tripling since 1980 and numbering about 6,000 in Sonoma County. It is the third-largest local faith, behind Catholicism and Judaism, identified in a 2000 national survey that counted Protestants by denomination.
“We believe we're all part of God's family,” Bevan said, describing the close-knit church whose members address one another as “brother” and “sister.”
The Salt Lake City-based Mormon Church, a financial empire worth an estimated $30 billion, builds or expands a chapel somewhere in the world every working day of the week, all of it paid in cash. No Mormon temple, meetinghouse or other ecclesiastical facility is under mortgage.
To fill the pews, the church dispatches nearly 52,000 missionaries, predominantly young men and women, to all 50 states and more than 100 foreign lands. They serve largely isolated from their families — two years for men, 18 months for women.
“The call of the church is to be an ensign, a beacon, a light to the world,” said John Bunker of Las Vegas, who is serving a three-year assignment as Santa Rosa Mission president in charge of 170 missionaries serving from Marin County to the Oregon border. “That call we believe comes from the Lord himself.”
The 6 million American Mormons are now outnumbered by the 7.8 million abroad. Since 1980, the faith has gained more than 9 million members.
There's a simple reason for the Latter-day Saints' appeal, said Perry Bingham, president of the Santa Rosa Stake, which includes 10 congregations in Santa Rosa, Sebastopol and Healdsburg.
“We have the answers to the big three questions,” he said. “Why are we here, where we came from and where we're going.”
People are “spirit children of God” before coming to earth, where they gain a body and endure the trials of life, Mormon doctrine asserts. In death, spirits depart the body and go to an afterlife, awaiting resurrection, a reunion of body and spirit, and continue to progress in wisdom and understanding.
Marsh, who is from Woodbine, Md., is 10 months into his mission. “You come to teach others,” he said, fortified by a cram course on Mormon scriptures that all missionaries take.
But he has found more to it than that. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” Marsh said. “I'm learning my relationship with the heavenly father. I'm learning what true happiness is. Still a long way to go, but I'm learning.”
Bevan, from Sandy, Utah, was paired with Marsh five weeks ago. Missionaries work in same-gender pairs, regularly changing both territory and companion. “It's a lot of work, all the time,” he said.
Prior to Santa Rosa, he proselytized among the pot growers in McKinleyville in Humboldt County and on the gritty streets of Vallejo. Gang members there gave the young men in dark suits and name tags a pass, Bevan said, in deference to their religious pursuit.
“They called us the Jesus brothers,” he said.
Both spent a year in college — Bevan at University of Utah, a state school; Marsh at church-owned Brigham Young University — before putting their lives on hold for their missions.
Bevan and Marsh recently spent an hour with James Willis, a 64-year-old Santa Rosa retiree who's been studying the Mormon faith for a year and intends to be baptized. Seated at a round table in Willis' living room, the three read and discussed church scriptures.
Missionaries call people like Willis “investigators,” because they are investigating the Mormon faith.
“I see the change in myself,” Willis said. “I'm more at ease with myself. I don't let things bother me as much as they used to.”
Born and raised a Catholic in New York City, Willis served as an altar boy and sang in the choir, but never felt comfortable. “It was not satisfying. I felt empty.” And when he asked questions, Willis said the response was: “Shut your mouth and do what you're told.”
He's ready to embrace the Mormon commandments: No alcohol, caffeine or tobacco. “I did like my shot of Jack Daniels once or twice a week,” Willis said. He's also eating more greens, salad and grains, in keeping with Joseph Smith's dietary dictates in the 1830s, ages before the promotion of low-fat diets.
A UCLA study published in 2008 said that Mormon men who abide by the church's health standards live 10 years longer than other American white males, and women live more than five years longer than other white females.
At a meeting to review their investigators' progress, several missionaries noted that teetotaling was a high hurdle for would-be Wine Country Mormons.
A Sebastopol-area woman named Marlene said she “really loves her wine and her coffee,” missionary Matthew Ricks of Bountiful, Utah, reported. “She's working on that.”
For the young proselytizers, life borders on monastic. No TV, movies or surfing the net. No girlfriends, no dating and assuredly no sex. Chastity until marriage is required of all Mormons. Phone calls home are limited to two a year — on Mother's Day and Christmas.
For this, a missionary pays about $10,000 to cover living expenses.
“I wouldn't have it any other way,” said Ryan Daley of Forestville, who returned in January from a mission to New Zealand. The isolation enables young men and women — most living on their own for the first time — to focus on the task of introducing their faith with strangers.
“You share what you know to be true,” said Daley, 21, who's now working at his father's Santa Rosa used-car lot and selling alarm systems. He plans to return to Santa Rosa Junior College in the fall, and eventually earn a master's in business administration.
There's no quota for obtaining converts, Daley said, recalling that he saw about 30 New Zealanders through baptism into the church.
Nor is missionary work mandatory. About 40 percent of Mormon men go on missions, and a far lower number of women serve. “They go as boys; they come back as men,” stake president Bingham said.
At home or on a mission, Mormons like to say they “live in the world but not of it.” Unlike the austere Amish, walled off on their farms as if they were still in the 19th century, the Saints — as these followers of Christ call themselves — inhabit a secular, commercial culture that often glorifies excess.
Daley, a 2006 graduate from El Molino High School, said he was the only devout Mormon on the Forestville campus, where the bathrooms reeked of marijuana, he said. But he had no regrets about clean living.
“I did it because it was worth it,” he said. “It's like insurance. If you never take that first drink, you'll never drink and drive.”
Mormon moral standards are high, but human failings are understood. “Not every Mormon is a model citizen going to heaven right away,” Bingham said.
They pay a tithe, 10 percent of their income, to the church, a cash flow estimated by Time magazine at $5.2 billion in 1996.
The church releases no financial reports, nor does it admit outsiders to the architecturally grand temples, where Mormon couples are “sealed” for life and for eternity. The secrecy and the separateness of church doctrine, which embraced polygamy until 1890, engendered suspicion that analysts say dogged Mormon Mitt Romney's failed presidential bid in 2008.
Because blacks were not admitted to Mormon priesthood until 1978, questions about discrimination also swirled around the church.
Mormons believe their faith is “the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth.” The Bible is regarded as holy scripture, augmented by The Book of Mormon, compiled by an ancient prophet named Mormon and revealed to Joseph Smith in the late 1820s.
Smith, who was murdered in 1844, is revered as a prophet endowed with divine authority that Mormons believe was lost when the early Christian apostles died. Thomas S. Monson, a prophet and president, heads the church today.
Motivated by their belief in eternal life, Mormons have compiled the largest genealogical library in the world with names of more than 2 billion deceased people. Family history research is available to the public in Salt Lake City, and is offered free online at www.familysearch.org.
A Pew Forum report last year found that 60 percent of Mormons consider themselves politically conservative, compared with 37 percent of the general population.
It also found that 68 percent of the Saints say their values are “often threatened by Hollywood,” a view only 42 percent of the general population shares. “You look at TV and everything you hold of value is mocked,” Daley said.
Since returning from his mission, Daley said he's become more selective about movies he'll watch. His recent favorite, “How to Train Your Dragon,” tells how a Viking boy ends the war between his people and dragons.
In “Avatar,” the sci-fi spectacular, Daley said he appreciated the gospel message, as the blue beings of Pandora try, but fail, to protect their paradise, and Eywa, the mother goddess, intervenes to save it.
His own faith is confirmed by his experience, Daley said. It came not as a single, momentous epiphany, but as a series of “many little ones,” he said.
Maintaining faith takes a lifetime. “It's like a seed,” he said. “If you stop watering it, the seed's going to die.”
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