John Taylor was an English religious leader who served as the third president of The Church from 1880 to 1887. He is the first and so far only president of the LDS Church to have been born outside the United States. He had formal schooling up to age fourteen, and then he served an initial apprenticeship to a cooper and later received training as a woodturner and cabinetmaker. He claimed that as a young man, he had a vision of "an angel in the heavens, holding a trumpet to his mouth, sounding a message to the nations" - the angel Moroni.
They then moved to Far West, Missouri, where Taylor was ordained an apostle on December 19, 1838. He assisted other church members as they fled frequent conflicts to Commerce, Illinois (soon after renamed Nauvoo). In 1839, Taylor and some of his fellow apostles served missions in Britain. While there, Taylor preached in Liverpool and was responsible for Mormon preaching in Ireland and the Isle of Man.
Taylor served as president of two missions of the LDS Church. In 1849, he began missionary work in France and was the first church mission president in the country. He also supervised missionary work in Germany, but did not himself go to any of the countries that would later form Germany. Taylor later served as president of the Eastern States Mission, based in New York City. In this capacity he published a newspaper that presented the position of the Latter-day Saints.
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