Edwin Q. Cannon - LDS Church Service

LDS Church Service

From 1964 to 1971, Cannon was a bishop of the LDS Church in Salt Lake City. From 1971 to 1974, he was the president of the Switzerland Mission of the church.

In 1978, three weeks after the LDS Church announced that it would no longer impose restrictions of black people receiving the priesthood or participating in temple ordinances, Cannon traveled to Africa on behalf of the church with Merrill J. Bateman to assess the prospects for church missionary work and growth in "black Africa". (At the time, Cannon was a counselor to James E. Faust in the church's International Mission, which had jurisdiction over all areas of the world not otherwise part of a mission.) After Bateman and Cannon reported the results of their trip, Cannon and his wife were called and set apart as the first Mormon missionaries to black Africa. They—along with Rendell and Rachel Mabey—preached in Nigeria and Ghana, baptized hundreds of converts, and established 27 branches of the LDS Church in Nigeria and Ghana. The first convert baptized in Africa was Anthony Obinna.

In the late 1980s, Cannon and his wife were the directors of the LDS Church's visitors' centre in Nauvoo, Illinois. For three months in 1989, Cannon was the interim president of the LDS Church's Germany Hamburg Mission; during this time, the regular president of the mission was working on getting Mormon missionaries admitted to East Germany.

After his interim service as mission president, Cannon was the second president of the Frankfurt Germany Temple from 1989 to 1992.