Elder Per G. Malm

Of the Seventy

When Elder Per Gösta Malm was 16 years old, he served a Church-service mission helping to build new meetinghouses in Germany, Finland, Netherlands, and Sweden. He has been diligently engaged in helping to build the Church ever since.

Elder Malm was born in September 1948 in Jönköping, Sweden, to Karl Gösta Ivar and Karin Anna-Greta Malm. He learned many of life’s most important lessons from his parents, punctuated by the testimony his father bore before passing away at age 48: “Stay true to the gospel.”

“He was teaching us that in the gospel we will find solutions to the things that matter most,” Elder Malm says.

Following the 18-month building mission, Elder Malm served full time in the Sweden Stockholm Mission. After his return, he married Ingrid Agneta Karlsson in the Bern Switzerland Temple in October 1969, took over his father’s real estate business, and earned a master’s degree from the University of Göteborg and a Swedish law degree (LLM) from Lund University.

He worked for the Church as a regional real estate manager. Later, as director for temporal affairs, he was assigned by the Presiding Bishopric to initiate a merger of the temporal affairs functions of the Europe Central, East, and North Areas.

While Elder and Sister Malm raised their eight children, he served as a stake mission president, branch president, high councilor, stake president, mission president, public affairs director for Sweden, and Area Seventy.

His experiences have served to confirm to him his parents’ teachings, which he hopes to share through his call to the Second Quorum of the Seventy. “The gospel is our anchor,” he says. “It will, if we stay true to it, produce a peace that goes beyond understanding.”