Background
Porter was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and later began attending Brigham Young University (Brigham Young University) as a recipient of a David O. McKay scholarship.
counselor General Missionary president
Porter was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and later began attending Brigham Young University (Brigham Young University) as a recipient of a David O. McKay scholarship.
Harvard University; Brigham Young University.
Porter married Susan Elizabeth Holland on February 2, 1977, in the Washington District of Columbia Temple and they are the parents of four children. Before attending Harvard University, where he received a doctoral degree in political science emphasizing Russian affairs, Porter spent a summer in the Soviet Union as an exchange student. He has worked for the federal government on the United States Senate Armed Services Committee and as executive director of the United States. Board for International Broadcasting.
He also worked for two years for the Northrop Corporation.
Before accepting a professorship at Brigham Young University, he served from 1990 to 1993 as the Bradley Senior Research Fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. During this period he authored.
Porter served in Germany under two mission presidents who were both native Germans holding United States citizenship, Walter H. Kindt and Rudolf K. Poecker. Kindt and Poecker had both been arrested a number of times by Soviet authorities because of their missionary activities, and Poecker used his time in Russian incarceration to learn the Russian language and tried to teach the doctrines of the church to any Russians he metropolitan
The stories that these two men frequently related to the missionaries under their supervision inspired Porter to change his university major to Russian Affairs.
In the 1980s, while a resident in Munich, where he worked for Radio Free Europe Radio Station Liberty as a foreign policy specialist, Porter served as president of the church"s Munich Servicemen"s Branch. He later served as a bishop in Virginia, and after accepting a position of Associate Professor at Brigham Young University, he served as a counselor to Noel B. Reynolds in a student stake presidency. Porter was initially called to the Second Quorum of the Seventy in 1995, but in 2003 was transferred to the First Quorum of the Seventy.
Since being called as a general authority, he has served in the presidencies of the church"s Europe East and Salt Lake City areas.
Other assignments as a general authority have included time as Executive Director of the church"s Correlation Department, and he assisted in coordinating the church"s Middle East/Africa North areas from 2008 to 2014. That assignment was done from the church"s headquarters in Salt Lake City.
He also served on the church"s Area Committee, with responsibility for tracking international issues of interest to the church. Since August 2014, he has been president of the church"s Europe East Area, centered in Moscow, Russia.
He is a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy.