Before Wayne Owens crossed Utah’s cultural divide by serving alternatively as a liberal Democratic representative and an ambassador for the LDS Church, there was David S. King.

A three-term congressman from Utah, ambassador to two African countries and a top official of the World Bank, King died Wednesday in Washington, D.C., area where he had lived most of his life. He was 91.

King grew up in Washington as the son of former Utah Sen. William H. King, who began serving the first of his four terms in 1917, the year David King was born.

After serving an LDS Church mission, King attended and graduated from Georgetown University Law School, then clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

In 1943, he returned to Utah where he practiced law and taught commercial law at Stevens-Henager Business College.

He ran for Congress in 1958 and in a stunning upset, defeated incumbent Republican William A. Dawson, joining newly elected Sen. Ted Moss in a tide that began to swing the solidly Republican state of Utah toward Democrats.

King won a second term, but left Congress after he unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Wallace Bennett in 1962.

After a two-year hiatus, King won another term in Congress in 1964.

In 1967, he was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson as ambassador to the Malagasy Republic (now known as Madagascar) and later as ambassador to Mauritius.

“I think I enjoyed my tenure as an ambassador even more than being a member of Congress,” he said in a 1984 interview with The Associated Press .

He was replaced as ambassador to both countries when Republican Richard Nixon came to power in 1969, but in 1977, he was appointed to the World Bank by Democratic president Jimmy Carter.

After that tenure he remained active in legal and consulting work in the Washington, D.C., area and in the 1980s he began working as an assistant to David Kennedy, the LDS Church’s ambassador-at-large, to establish the church’s foothold in Africa.

“I was the only one to give a speech in the native Malagasay Language,” he told the AP, when he was one of several ambassadors speaking at an event in Malagasy. “People are still talking about that because that’s something ambassadors just don’t do. We as Americans are usually too arrogant to learn the other guy’s language and we insist they do business on our terms.”

Besides his work as an ambassador for the LDS Church, he served as an LDS mission president in Haiti and as president of the LDS Temple in Washington, D.C.

He is survived by his wife, Rosalie and five children. A son, David Jr., preceded him in death.

The funeral will be held today in the Kensington LDS Ward in Kensington, Md.

No.

There is no inconsistency between this statement of the Saviour and the actuality of the apostasy.

The Church believes its message of Christianity restored is important enough to justify the use of any honourable means available to call attention to its work.

The doctrine of infant baptism was unheard of until the third century A.D., and is purely a human innovation.

I laugh a little when I first read them, but I also appreciate greatly the last few years and the return to blunt assessments of core doctrines being presented in General Conference.

The church has not repudiated the principle of plural marriage but, in obedience to a divine commandment, has suspended its operation.