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The sheer beauty of Sunday worship at the Salt Lake Valley LDS First Ward reflects an elemental fact:

Church members hear the gospel with their eyes.

The Mormon ward, a few blocks from Salt Lake City's Trolley Square, caters to the hearing-impaired and their families, one of eight wards or branches in Utah and scores more worldwide devoted to American Sign Language, or ASL.

Otherwise familiar LDS rituals draw heavily on assisting technology and decades of careful adaptation within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A clear and strong sense of community unites the congregation, forged by shared experience and language as well as mutual faith.

The rich history of deaf Mormons all seems to coalesce like a jewel as members join in on Sunday's first hymn. With captions flickering across a host of TV screens around the chapel, their hands and arms arc and weave quietly in unison as they sign instead of sing the lyrics to "Home Can Be a Heaven on Earth."

"It's not the same here. It's better," women's Relief Society President Cindee Hansen says afterward. "I cannot go back to a hearing ward. I love it here. They are my family."

Foreign language wards are not uncommon in Mormonism, but bonds among deaf members go beyond communicating without English. Jamy Reudter, a counselor in the First Ward's bishopric, says the congregation offers comfort and support to people often isolated and even looked down upon due to their disability.

Though not hearing impaired, Reudter learned ASL as a Mormon missionary in Wisconsin from a couple investigating the faith and, he says, it changed his life. He even commuted from Tooele to Salt Lake City for a spell to be part of the ward.

"There is a warmth and a camaraderie here," Reudter says.

As daffodils and forsythia bloom outside, a weekly service in late March brings about 120 people to the outwardly typical Mormon meetinghouse. In flows a spectrum of well-dressed single adults, families with kids and older members, some using walkers to navigate the pews.

After a morning service for hearing members in another ward, hearing-impaired devotees start to collect shortly after noon in the chapel, a sacred space specially designed and equipped for their needs.

The floor slopes downward toward the front, akin to a movie theater, giving all a clearer view of the pulpit. Windows are high on the walls and the lighting is recessed to minimize glare.

Members of the all-male bishopric sit to the right and face the pulpit — not the congregation, as they do in most wards. The sacrament table is located to the left, allowing for the smooth flow of a core Mormon communion rite without the advent of sound.

Worshippers settle and cheerfully sign to one another as a large TV monitor is wheeled toward the front. Above the pulpit, an even larger screen drops mechanically from the ceiling to display each speaker while ASL interpreters simultaneously sign their testimonies and sermons.

A woman tucked in a small booth in the chapel translates ASL into amplified spoken words, both for the hearing and a few visually impaired churchgoers who also attend. Several animated ASL conversations continue unobtrusively around the room well after services begin.

Hymns have minimal piano accompaniment and only a few voices rise in audible song while the rest of the congregation signs to the music.

The profoundly deaf and the hearing impaired worship alongside fully hearing members at the First Ward, which covers south Davis County to about 5200 South in Salt Lake County. The Salt Lake Valley Second Ward, formed in 1998, serves the deaf from the midvalley area south to Bluffdale.

Many First Ward members opt in across geographic boundaries for local LDS wards and some forgo attending church with relatives to be part of services with fellow deaf believers.

After struggling with frantic lip-reading and note-taking during lessons at a regular ward, Joseph Hancock says he turned to the First Ward about 18 months ago, although his family still worships elsewhere.

"I'm learning so much more," he says.

It has been more than a century since leading organizers of a deaf Mormon Sunday school in Ogden — Max W. Woodbury and Elsie M. Christiansen — wrote to then-LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith about addressing the lack of a formal meeting place for hearing-impaired members.

Three years later, on Feb. 14, 1917, Smith dedicated the Ogden Branch for the Deaf.

Today, there are nearly 125 LDS units for deaf members around the world, according to a directory compiled by deaflds.org, a website dedicated to information for deaf Mormons.

Retired printer Lynn Losee remembers traveling regularly from Salt Lake City to attend the Ogden branch. He later served as a longtime bishop at the Salt Lake Valley First Ward. Even in the early years, Losee says, technologies such as text telephones, overhead projectors and closed captioning all helped deaf members strengthen their embrace of Mormon doctrine.

Today, he notes, the First Ward uses a video-conferencing system synced with smartphones to reach LDS seminary students across the globe.

A key milestone in that progress came in the early 1990s, with the release of ASL translations of the Book of Mormon on videotape. The DVD version, published in 2001, fills 17 discs.

"Many people don't realize how different ASL is from English," Brigham Young University scholar Minnie Mae Wilding-Diaz, head translator on the project, wrote in 1991. "ASL is as complex and intricate and profound as any other language, and as difficult to learn."

Used by a majority of deaf Americans, Wilding-Diaz wrote, ASL is a uniquely three-dimensional language. "What we see," she wrote, "is what we know."

Devout Mormons believe they will receive a perfect body in the afterlife. When that happens, Ben Edwards, another bishop's counselor in the First Ward, says he "will still use ASL."

"It's not a barrier," Edwards says. "It's just a way of life."

Twitter: @Tony_Semerad