"More Mormons Flocking To City"

Brent was interviewed for an article that appeared in the New York Daily News:

"More Mormons Flocking To City"
(by Charles W. Bell)
Saturday, January 24, 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."