This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It was Christmas 1965 and Elder Robert Burton had just gotten his new assignment - Beirut, Lebanon.
The 19-year-old Mormon missionary from Salt Lake City was serving in the LDS Church's Swiss mission, which had responsibility for Italy, all of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Burton and his mission companion were to be the first proselytizing missionaries sent into the largely Muslim nation in years.
"I advised my parents that my monthly support could no longer come in the form of a Zions Bank check," says Burton, who teaches computer science at Brigham Young University. "And, of course, songs such as 'Israel, Israel, God is Calling' had to be dropped from the collection of acceptable hymns."
Burton and other American missionaries walked the streets of what was then the Paris of the Middle East, looking for converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The response was overwhelming. Within two years, church membership went from a paltry 14 to more than 350.
It all fell apart with the civil war that began in 1975.
Many ethnic Armenian members living in Lebanon immigrated to Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, while missionaries and other Americans were ordered to leave. Slowly, the LDS Church there dwindled and died. It was not officially resurrected until the late 1990s, when church headquarters sent humanitarian missionaries to help support a tiny Mormon congregation. The church is not officially recognized in Lebanon, so the 40 or so members meet every week in an apartment as the "LDS Association." Proselytizing is forbidden.
The story of Mormonism in Lebanon has been a recurring cycle of creation and dissolution. Over the past two weeks, yet another round of violence began, forcing the current humanitarian missionary couple to leave the country.
Again the question: What will happen to the Lebanese members left behind this time?
Rumors of wars: Mormon Apostle Orson Hyde arrived in the Middle East in 1841, a mere decade after the LDS Church was organized in upstate New York, to dedicate the Holy Land for the spread of Mormonism. But it wasn't until the late 1800s that missionary work began in earnest. That didn't last long, either. It resumed in 1935, but discontinued with the outbreak of World War II. In 1947 a mission was re-established with 12 missionaries, including a young Carlos E. Asay (later an LDS general authority) who gained publicity for the church by joining the Lebanese national basketball team, according to a history written by Robert Collier.
When Burton and others returned in 1965, they felt certain this time their work would last. Confidence ran high as they began baptizing their Mormon converts in the Mediterranean Sea.
"We had more converts than all missionaries in Switzerland put together," Burton recalls.
Few missionaries learned Arabic, but they lived in the Christian sector (where many people spoke French and English), and members helped them translate when necessary.
In the spring of 1967, the Six Days War thwarted their efforts.
Burton had left, but 10 missionaries remained under the leadership of Robert E. Fowles, now a cardiologist in Salt Lake City. The young elders knew about the war from newspapers, but weren't worried for their own safety until members urged them to flee. They went to the American Embassy in Beirut for advice, only to find it evacuated. Then they went to the airport, where an American official told them to get out of the country immediately.
They found seats on the last plane to depart, Fowles recalls, leaving their belongings behind, not even knowing where they were heading. They landed in Rome, then returned to Switzerland for a few weeks. But Fowles and others yearned to return to Beirut, so their reluctant mission president allowed them to go back.
There they had more success and more adventures, including being thrown in a Beirut jail on suspicion of being "Zionist CIA agents."
But their optimism proved naive. Within a decade, their members were left alone again.
Dreaming of a church: In 1985, Nabil Assouad, a Beirut resident, went on a three-week vacation to London to get away from the civil war and to practice his English. While there, he had a dream in which he saw a church and chapel where he felt a kind of peace he had never known.
A few days later, he saw an LDS chapel near Hyde Park and recognized it from his dream. Within nine days, he was baptized.
Assouad then returned to Beirut and taught his family about the new faith. One by one, his whole family was baptized in different places and circumstances. He and his brother, Karim, both served missions for the church, in England and Belgium respectively.
Their families now form the nucleus of the Beirut branch, with each brother taking turns as president.
Meanwhile, Kevork Khanadenian was looking for his church. Fowles had baptized Khanadenian and his family in 1967 when he was 11. When the Americans left in 1975, they gave him all the church records, manuals and copies of the Book of Mormon. For 25 years, he had his faith and his books, but no congregation.
By early 2002, Khanadenian found the LDS Church on the Internet. He contacted the humanitarian missionaries and showed them his baptismal certificate, a photo of himself with Fowles and lots of other related documents. Since then, he and his wife, Zovig, have been to Utah twice. They were sealed in the Salt Lake temple in 2004.
These are the people who will hold the church together in these tough times, says Sharon Heiss, a Sandy grandmother who returned from a humanitarian mission to Beirut in 2004. She believes the church there is "strong and growing," with an adequate supply of male leaders to officiate in the church's lay clergy.
"The church will continue even with the war," Heiss said Thursday. "Somehow or other, they will manage."