In 1956 Latter-day Saints from the United States living in Peru began a branch and requested an official mission in the country. When the Andes Mission opened in 1959, 700 Peruvians had already joined the Church. Rapid growth continued, and by the 1980s the gospel was taught in both Spanish and Quechua.
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History of the Church in Peru
While living in Chile in 1851, Elder Parley P. Pratt of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles looked to Peru as a potentially fertile field for gospel preaching. “I had much desire to go to Peru,” he wrote later, “but an empty purse and imperfect tongue, which has only barely begun to stammer in that language … combined to cause me to wait a little.”
Although some efforts were made, more than a century passed before Pratt’s dream of establishing the Church in Peru was realized. In July 1956, a branch was organized in Lima, and members, primarily Americans working in the country, began inviting their neighbors to meetings in their homes. Missionaries arrived a month later. By 1959, when the Andes Mission was organized in Lima, more than 700 converts had been baptized, and three branches had been organized.
With such rapid growth, young men across Peru accepted calls as construction missionaries, gaining practical training in construction trades while building much-needed meetinghouses throughout the country. Growth continued as members continued to “proclaim [the] everlasting gospel” from city to city (see Doctrine and Covenants 99:1) in Spanish and Quechua, a local Indigenous language. In 1986, the Lima Peru Temple, the first of four in Peru, was dedicated. Two years later, seven stakes were created in Lima in just two days, bringing the total number of stakes in the country to 34, in Lima, Sicuani, Trujillo, Arequipa, Chimbote, Chiclayo, Iquitos, Tacna, Piura, Huancayo, and Cusco.
Peruvian Saints have shown incomparable faith and devotion to the gospel and their communities. Amid violence, natural disasters, and civil unrest, they have remained bound together in love and have served the living and the dead.