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Georgetown, Guyana » At least 30 missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were returned to their homes in Guyana on Wednesday evening after being briefly detained pending deportation in a country that has been a hotbed of Mormon growth over the past few years.

Police said the missionaries' travel documents were not current. They have been given one month to leave the South American nation.

LDS church spokesman Scott Trotter said the problem involved "new visa regulations," but declined to elaborate. He said the church was "working with Guyana and U.S. authorities to reach an amicable solution."

Acting U.S. ambassador Karen Williams said the arrests "come as a surprise." No incidents involving the missionaries were reported prior to their detainment. "I don't want to speculate as to a reason," Williams said.

The church emissaries - most of whom are U.S. citizens - were simply doing missionary work, said Leslie Sobers, a local spokeswoman for the church.

Officials said there appear to have been some ongoing negotiations over the missionaries' visas and work permits. A lawyer for the missionaries, Nigel Hughes, said he filed a motion with the courts and a judge issued an injunction blocking police from expelling the missionaries last Thursday. It's unclear whether that injunction had been lifted this week.

U.S. citizens traveling to Guyana need a valid passport, and immigration officials usually grant visitors a 30-day stay, according to the U.S. Department of State. The country's permitting policy is informal due to its small population, according to Ram & McRae, a legal consulting firm in the capital of Georgetown.

The English-speaking, former British territory recently has been one of the fastest countries of growth for the Mormon church, which has about 100 total missionaries in the nation of about 770,000 residents. The first LDS missionaries arrived in Guyana in 1988 - 10 years after a massive group suicide and massacre left 900 people dead at Pastor Jim Jones' People's Temple, near Georgetown, in 1978.

In a story about the growth of the church in Guyana published in 2004 in the LDS-owned Church News, local Mormon leaders said they found people in Guyana to be "skittish" toward outside religious groups in the wake of the infamous Jonestown incident. In response, local members devoted their time to organizing community service projects in the nation where per capita income is about $1,400 a year, according to the United Nations.

It took 15 years before an official meetinghouse was dedicated, but within a year that single branch had become five units. Today, about 4,000 people are members of 16 Mormon congregations in Guyana, according to LDS records. Most of the church's growth has been in Georgetown and other coastal cities, but earlier this year the LDS' West Indies Mission decided to dispatch missionaries to the interior city of Linden, according to blogger Matt Martinich, a former LDS Missionary who covers the church's international growth.

Officials did not say where the detained missionaries were serving.