Brad Sheppard went to Brazil as an LDS missionary in the late 1960s, when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had only one stake and a few thousand members in a country that covers almost half the continent of South America.

When he returned in 1996 as president of the church's Brazil Salvador Mission, what he found was "just a miracle" to him and others whose early experience there could not have foreshadowed the flood of converts that would join the LDS Church in the intervening years. By the time he finished his assignment in 1999, the church had more than 743,000 members along with 186 stakes, 1,264 wards, 615 branches, 42 districts and 26 missions.

Though the totals will vary by nation, that kind of skyrocketing growth has become characteristic in Central and South America, widely known as having the fastest-growing LDS membership in the world. The numbers mirror, though on a much smaller scale, the religious fervor that is literally changing the religious face of Latin America, as evangelical churches have swept the continent, adding tens of millions of converts to their flocks in the past few decades.

The mass exodus from a region historically dominated by Catholicism has generated myriad social and political changes whose complexity has left much of the religious world wondering how the future of the region will be affected.

While the rationale for such changes may not be understood well on a large scale across denominations or countries, Sheppard believes that 1978 marked the turning point in Brazil's march toward becoming one of the world's hotbeds of LDS conversion. Spencer W. Kimball, then president of the LDS Church, said that year he received a revelation from God ending the faith's ban on priesthood ordination for black males.

Sheppard's reaction, like that of so many LDS faithful, was one of rejoicing. "For anybody that served in Brazil, you knew that with the revelation it would just explode, and that's what's happening."

Particularly in the mission Sheppard presided over, in the state of Bahia, where 80 percent of LDS congregants are black. "When they come into the church, it becomes their life. Their friends become members, and it's just amazing to see their lives literally revolve around the church."

But the sheer number of people joining the LDS Church in the region has been a major challenge for church headquarters in Utah to keep up with — not only the demand for physical facilities like chapels and temples, but training new converts to be leaders in a lay church that has no paid clergy and relies on the volunteer efforts of its members to function.

American Latter-day Saints, particularly those who live in Utah, have difficulty grasping the challenges that face their fellow members south of the border, according to Mark Grover, a librarian at Brigham Young University who has spent 30 years researching and writing about the LDS Church in Brazil after he received a doctorate in Latin American history.

Inadequate transportation, communication and economic resources make daily life a struggle for many in Latin America just to keep food on the table and a roof overhead. When people are converted to the LDS Church, many have to make substantial lifestyle changes in order to volunteer their time for church service and to pay a tenth of their income in tithing to the church.

President Gordon B. Hinckley has recognized the challenges, Grover said, and is addressing the economic disparity through establishment of the church's Perpetual Education Fund. It provides loans to young church members — most of them returned missionaries — who go back to their native countries and use the money for education to help lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

An added boost to the spread of the Perpetual Education Fund has been established recently at BYU, according to George Handley, director of Latin American Studies there. He said a select group of students will serve internships in Latin America during the coming years "to provide job training for church members in those areas" in conjunction with the Church Education System and Church Employment Services. The move is another step toward cultivating local leadership.

But leadership isn't the only issue the church faces in Latin America.

Grover watched membership in Brazil explode after the priesthood ban was lifted, recalling a conversation he had once with a mission president there who told him the missionaries he presided over would "go out and baptize a branch (a geographic unit of members) that day. He was talking about 120 people in one day. How do you organize a branch when not one person has any type of experience in the church?"

While the race issue may not have been the impetus for growth in other parts of the region, the same type of phenomenon was happening across the continent just the same.

Thus the question of governance has played itself out all over Latin America, and Sheppard says the church continues to struggle with it, along with a companion problem: a large body of converts who fell away from activity in the church shortly after baptism.

John Hawkins, a professor of anthropology at BYU, has been doing research in Guatemala since 1968, and said finding a congregation where new members felt welcome was "one of the great problems" the church has had with growth in that country, particularly during the 1980s. "There has, in the past, been this notion (among missionaries) that if they are not willing to commit to baptism in two weeks, you drop them and keep going.

"Members found that oppressive" because conversions were happening so rapidly that once the missionaries moved on to other areas, the people they baptized were left without a support system and the local members were overloaded trying to keep up with all the new converts. Many simply gave up and waited to see "who the good ones were" that would come to church on their own and make a contribution without a lot of nurturing from the congregation, he said.

Though the church does not provide statistics on activity rates, the number of inactive members in some areas eventually outpaced those who were active by a substantial margin, Grover and Hawkins agreed.

"Before we arrived (in 1996) there had been a lot of youth baptized without family support," Sheppard said. While some of them "have gone on and done great things," many others had slipped away, he said, and retaining current members "was a challenge. We spent a lot of time working on retention and reactivation. In fact, there was time spent every week by missionaries just devoted to that effort."

The result was "kind of a mixed bag with reactivation. There were some great success stories and others were very challenging. We tried to encourage missionaries to light that little flame burning somewhere in their hearts."

Since becoming the church's leader in 1995, President Hinckley has helped shift what Grover and others saw as an emphasis on baptism and boosting membership figures to a focus on family conversion and support for existing members.

Sheppard said that when he arrived in Brazil in 1996, missionaries in his mission were baptizing as many as 200 members a month. But "when we placed the focus on families and working with complete families, the numbers dropped down to about 100 per month."

The philosophy was part of the training Sheppard received at the Missionary Training Center before he left for Brazil, and "the area presidency's focus was to teach families as well. There wasn't a rule you couldn't teach an individual, but the focus was on families" who come into the church with "a built-in support system," he said.

"The philosophy now is it's better to retain all those we baptize than to baptize large numbers and not be able to retain them. I believe that focus came with President Hinckley's statements about what every member needed was friend and calling and to be nurtured."

Kristen Lewis, a BYU graduate who recently returned from the Argentina Resistencia Mission, said that philosophy was the entire focus of her time in South America. "Our mission president was excellent about the fact that it wasn't numbers that matter. If you're worried about a number of people, rather than the actual people themselves, that goes against what we believe.

"We were very focused on getting individuals and families and worrying about them, rather than a number or a statistic. We really wanted to find whole families — we wanted to change lives and not just a lifestyle." Lewis believes the focus on individuals is the key to really converting people's hearts, rather than just their names, to the LDS faith.

"I think things happen at the right time and place. You start by making a little difference," she said. "They might not be interested until years later after many more missionaries have come and they decide they are ready to make a commitment. I think it's the legacy of missionaries to help them understand it and get to the point where they are ready" to join and fully participate.

General Conference

• General sessions are scheduled for 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in the Conference Center. A priesthood session is set for 6 p.m. Saturday.

• Tickets have already been distributed. Doors open 90 minutes before each session. Those attending must be at least 8 years old.

• General sessions will be carried live on KSL NewsRadio 1160, KSL-TV, KBYU-TV, Direct TV channel 374, DISH Network channel 9403 and on the Galaxy 11 satellite, transponder 17.