Beulah Philson has long been a devout Baptist. At a young age, she made a promise to her parents that she would never abandon her religious roots.

But on a recent Sunday morning, Ms. Philson, 56, made the trek across town to fellowship at Harlem’s newly built five-story Mormon Temple on the corner of 128th Street and Lenox Avenue.

After years of trying one church service after another, Ms. Philson is taking a chance on something brand new.

“The black Baptist church just isn’t doing anything for me,” Ms. Philson, who was a member of four different black churches in Harlem before deciding to call it quits about two months ago, said. “I want to see if the Mormon Church has anything to offer.”

Ms. Philson admits she knows little about the Mormon Church, but she said she heard a while back that the famed Motown singer Gladys Knight is an active member of the fold.

Regardless, Ms. Philson decided to visit the meetinghouse in Harlem only after she was approached by several Mormon missionaries a few weeks ago while waiting to catch the bus along Harlem’s busy 125th Street thoroughfare.

“They were very friendly,” she said. “They told me that I had an open invitation to come to their new building anytime I chose to visit.”

While Mormonism over the past decade has become the fastest-growing religion in America, it has especially taken hold in black urban areas like Harlem, where black parishioners say they are actively looking for an alternative to traditional black protestant teachings.

Each Sunday, scores of African Americans bypass well-known black churches to make it to the 11 a.m. church service. At a time when church services tend to be segregated, the Mormons are celebrating the widespread diversity among their congregation.

Mormon officials tell me that in poorer and working-class black neighborhoods, they are providing the social services that black churches used to offer. And the locals, they say, are coming.

Still, if anyone knows the history of the Mormon Church, one has to wonder why African Americans would be attracted to the church’s teachings. Until 1978, the church subscribed to the belief that blacks were spiritually inferior to whites and should be excluded from priesthood, a position achieved by most Mormon men.

Organized in 1830, the church also once taught that blacks were the descendants of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who was banished after murdering his brother Abel, and of Ham, the son of Noah who broke a long taboo when he looked at the nude body of his drunken father. The “curse of Ham” was Noah’s decision to condemn into slavery the descendants of Ham’s son Canaan. Black folks were supposed to fall under this lineage.

When told of the history of the church, Ms. Philson didn’t seem bothered. “This kind of talk is nothing new,” she said. “Good white Protestants enslaved my people and used religion to justify slavery. I measure the church on where it stands now, not on where it was 25 years ago.”

In 1998, it was rumored that leaders at the church’s Salt Lake City headquarters were considering offering an official apology for its discriminatory past, but that apology never came.

The church, which has no paid clergy – it depends on lay members to lead worship and perform such rituals as baptisms, ordinations, and infant blessings – is expanding into black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Detroit.

African-American Mormons have created Web sites, online chat rooms, and blogs, where they seem to reconcile the church’s discriminatory past with a resolve to help transform it for the better.

Quiet as it’s kept, in communities like Harlem, where the black Baptists and Methodists Church have long been able to draw in locals each Sunday, there is concern. Ms. Philson hasn’t made the conversion yet. She has recently been perusing the Book of Mormon and has been surfing online to find out how the doctrine differs from the traditional religious teachings she inherited from her parents many years ago.

“I’ve got to do some more homework,” she said. “But I have not closed my ears to the Mormons. I may have finally found what I’ve been looking for.”