This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For its first century the Latter-day Saints remained an overwhelmingly American church, but a sustained expansion of full time missionary work after the Second World War, and especially from the 1960s onward, carried it into Latin America, Africa and Asia at a pace its earlier nineteenth century European missions had never matched. Growth outside the United States ran fastest of all in Latin America, above all in Mexico, Brazil and Chile, while growth in Africa accelerated markedly after a 1978 policy change opened priesthood ordination and temple access to Black members for the first time.
By late February 1996 the church's own count showed 4,720,000 members living outside the United States against 4,719,000 within it, the first time the international church had outnumbered the domestic one. That crossing point kept widening afterward, and by the early 2000s a majority of the church's own membership spoke a language other than English.
What this changed for the Latter-day Saints' spread was the church's transformation from an American institution with foreign missions into a genuinely worldwide body whose center of gravity now sits outside the country where it began. The 1978 policy change and the missionary expansion that followed it together did more to internationalize the church's membership than anything in its first hundred years combined.