Mission president

Mission president is a priesthood leadership position in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). A mission president presides over a mission and the missionaries serving in the mission. Depending on the particular mission, a mission president may also be the presiding priesthood leader of some or all Latter-day Saints within the geographic boundaries of the mission. Mission presidents are ordained high priests of the church.

Mission presidents are assigned to a mission by the leadership of the LDS Church and typically discover the location a few months before their departure. Mission presidents are men typically between 40 and 65 years old. In the past some mission presidents have been much younger; LeGrand Richards and Stephen R. Covey both served as mission presidents while in their 20s and Thomas S. Monson became a mission president at age 31. In more recent years younger mission presidents have been more rare. In 2005, there were 130 new mission presidents, the youngest of them, Norbert Ounleu, was 35. The only mission president called under the age of 30 since 2005 was Kerving H. Joseph, who was 29 when he became president of the Haiti Port-au-Price Mission in 2009.

Mission presidents are generally assigned to areas other than where they reside at the time of their call. There are exceptions, such as Richard G. Hinckley, who presided over the Utah Salt Lake City Mission. In 2009, at least two of the newly called mission presidents were assigned to the mission they resided in: Kerving H. Joseph (who was then still the president of the Haiti Port-au-Prince mission at the time of the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake) and Claude R. Gamiette, a native and resident of Guadaloupe, who was appointed president of West Indies Mission, which covered Guadaloupe. Tonga has also had a few men native to the country who were residing in the islands when called to serve as presidents of the Tongan mission. Effian Kadarusman, an Indonesian, served as president of the Indonesia Jakarta Mission for four years in the 1980s. With over 400 missions, there are few which have a president who was a resident in the mission boundaries at the time of his call at any given time. An example of an exception occurred in approximately 2005, when the church decided to have Venezuelan natives serve as presidents of all the local missions due to growing discord between the United States and Venezuela, but often the presidents were from areas of Venezuela other than where they were called to.

...
Wikipedia