LAGOS, Nigeria — Outside Zion Osandu Ndukwe's one-room apartment, a naked toddler ran up and down a filthy hallway lit by a single candle. The power in the overcrowded slum was off yet again. The stench from the communal bathroom overpowered the fragrance of spices in the bubbling soup a neighbor was stirring.

But this night, the misery all around Ndukwe — the crime, the uncollected trash, the bathtub-size potholes, the cars belching black smoke — stopped at his door. It was a Monday evening, and because Ndukwe, 39, had been baptized into the Mormon Church six months earlier, that meant it was time to be with his family and sing God's praises.

"I am a child of God!" he sang, as he, his wife and their 4-year-old daughter celebrated in loud, joyous voices a faith once known for its all-white membership.

"I'm a changed man," Ndukwe said, sitting on a bed that took up most of his apartment. "I used to drink. I had girlfriends outside my marriage. I don't do that anymore, and I feel better. The Mormon Church contributed 100 percent to the change."

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it is formally known, now has more members outside the United States than inside it. The church's rise from its roots in Utah to a steadily growing global faith in 176 countries and territories has been aided by the Internet, including the popular www.mormon.org site; by a satellite system linking 6,000 of its churches worldwide with the Salt Lake City headquarters; and by tens of thousands of missionaries knocking on doors from Lagos to Lapland.

As the world's largest faiths — Islam, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Hinduism — expand across the developing world, smaller faiths such as Mormonism are also gaining strength. The Mormon Church, which did not permit blacks to become priests until 1978, says it now has more than 250,000 members in Africa, including almost 80,000 in Nigeria.

Mormonism, which teaches that an American named Joseph Smith was a prophet who received visions from God about how to restore the true and original Christian church, had 1.7 million members in 1960. Today, according to church statistics, it has about 13 million, more than 7 million of them outside the United States.

The church's landmark six-spire temple in Kensington, Md., was its only one east of the Rocky Mountains when it opened in 1974. Now there are Mormon temples in more than 40 countries, from China to Finland to Ghana, and more than 8,400 Mormon churches or meetinghouses abroad, with a new one built nearly every day.

As the church grows, it is gaining global recognition.

"A lot of people think nothing but polygamy" when they hear of the Mormons, said Rodney Stark, a religious studies specialist at Baylor University in Texas. Even though that practice has been outlawed by the church for more than a century. But as more people acquire Mormon friends and neighbors, Stark said, Mormons "are no longer seen as a peculiar little sect. They are too big."

Jan Shipps, a Methodist scholar who has written extensively about the Mormons, said, "When a cult grows up, it becomes a culture."

FOCUS ON FAMILIES

Early Sunday morning in the dusty Oshodi neighborhood of Lagos, the streets were noisy and teeming. Women carried bundles on their heads — cans of paint or a sewing machine. Creaking yellow buses were overcrowded. Wealthier people drove past in ancient Mercedes sedans.

Amid the shacks and open sewers of the haphazard street, one place stood out: a gated, cream-colored compound with a steepled church. Inside the spotless chapel, about 170 people sat in rows under whirring ceiling fans as an organist played hymns. Almost every worshiper was black, and every man wore a white shirt and tie.

One after another, adults and children walked to the microphone and professed their devotion to the Mormon faith. Nearly all had once belonged to a larger Christian church they found lacking. Perhaps most of all, they said, they were initially attracted to the Mormon belief that devout families stay together eternally, not just until death.

Joshua Matthews Ebiloma, 40, a sales manager at a power generator company, said the Mormons offered him "peace of mind."

Nigeria is half Muslim and almost half Christian. Proselytizing foreigners, from the United States to Saudi Arabia, are pouring millions of dollars into the African nation of 135 million to expand their faiths.

Ebiloma has sampled a range of them. He was born into a pagan family and still bears the tribal scar marks carved into his cheeks when he was young. After attending Muslim schools, he tried various Christian churches before finding what he described as "happiness and peace" in Mormonism.

Ebiloma nodded and smiled as fellow Mormons told their stories. One woman described the joy of having her family "sealed," a ritual that Mormons believe ensures that families stay together beyond death.

Another woman praised Gordon Hinckley, the 97-year-old church president in Salt Lake City, who followers believe receives divine revelations. "I know President Hinckley is the living prophet," she said, just as amplified clapping and stomping in a nearby Pentecostal church began drowning out more testimonies.

"It is quiet and more organized in here," Ebiloma said later. "In other churches, people are shouting at the top of their lungs, sweating so much they need a hanky. One thing I know for sure: God is not deaf."

Ebiloma said those quiet services, along with the fact that men wear white shirts, have led many to think that his church is strange: "My friends ask, 'What are you doing in there? Did they make you wear a uniform?' "

Many scholars say the Mormons' decision not to adopt more local customs — such as incorporating African drumming or dancing into Sunday services — is one reason the church has not experienced the same remarkable growth as other denominations. Pentecostals, a lively evangelical Christian movement, can draw half a million worshipers to their all-night services here.

Nigerian Catholic and Pentecostal leaders said Mormonism is growing and becoming more visible especially because of its fine buildings, but is still small. Others take issue with membership statistics, saying that by counting as members those who have been baptized, they include those who have fallen away from the church.

Among the places the church says it is particularly vibrant are Brazil and Mexico, which have about 1 million Mormons each, and the Philippines, with nearly 600,000. In Africa, there are Mormon congregations in 27 countries.

Ebiloma said he especially likes that Mormons don't preach that people of other faiths are going to hell, and that Mormon church leaders are largely unpaid and support themselves with other jobs. Abstinence from alcohol, another church practice, was a tougher sell. But gradually, with the help of his favorite part of the church — regular home visits — he abandoned his Guinness beer.

"If you are bereaved or you have a new baby or you don't have money to pay your hospital bills, church members rally around you," he said, smiling. "You tell me: Is this a church I should leave?"

Ebiloma is a now a Mormon priest, a lay position which, three decades ago, he could not have held because of the color of his skin. Influenced by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, many Mormons in the United States grew increasingly uncomfortable with that policy.

It wasn't until 1978 that the Mormon president at the time said he had received a divine revelation and lifted the ban against ordaining black men to the priesthood, which has since been open to all "worthy" male candidates over the age of 12.

Like many members interviewed in Nigeria, Ebiloma said he knew nothing of that history. "But I know this church is not racist," he said. "Here it's strange if there is a white person in church."

Newell Bringhurst, an American scholar who has written books about the Mormon Church, said the church has been "more successful among blacks outside the United States than inside," partly because abroad there is less "awareness of this past historic discrimination."

The main pressure for the 1978 policy change, he said, "came from the Mormon Church wanting to expand outside the United States. There was a certain element of pragmatism. Potential growth was being impeded in places like Brazil and Africa."

INTERNET-SAVVY

A few miles away, in another Mormon church, Muyiwa Omowaiye was becoming one of more than 220,000 people a year abroad who are baptized into the Mormon Church — four times the 54,000 annual baptisms in the United States. Like many people around the world, he first started learning about the church on the Internet.

Millions of people first learn of the religion through its vast online depository of genealogical records.

The Salt Lake City headquarters has considerable oversight over the global church and transmits conferences and leadership training sessions via satellite to churches around the world.