A special broadcast honoring the 100th birthday of President Russell M. Nelson will be livestreamed on Sept. 9 on the YouTube channel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The 75-minute broadcast will celebrate President Nelson’s life and teachings and his ministry as the church’s prophet since 2018.
“How thankful we are for a prophet of God, his inspired teachings and his invitations to follow the Savior’s example of love and righteousness in all that we do,” President Jeffrey R. Holland, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, said in a letter announcing the broadcast.
The livestream will begin at 4 p.m. and also be available on Broadcasts.ChurchofJesusChrist.org and the Gospel Stream app in 18 languages.
Afterward, the event will be available for on-demand viewing on YouTube, Gospel Media and the Gospel Stream app.
Last week, more than 94,000 young single adult Latter-day Saints sent 100th birthday messages to President Nelson. A Guinness World Record adjudicator stopped counting after 31,384 people had written in-person and virtual messages and declared a new record for “Most Contributions to a Greeting Card.”
President Nelson told church members earlier this year that his wish for his 100th birthday was that those who wanted to commemorate it would follow Jesus Christ’s teaching about the shepherd in the parable of the lost sheep and reach out to “the one” in their life who may be feeling lost or alone.
The broadcast will share examples of how people commemorated his birthday by helping the one.
President Holland invited church members in his letter about the broadcast to consider how they might respond to President Nelson’s invitation.
“For ideas to assist in this effort, visit the 99+1 resource page on ChurchofJesusChrist.org,” he wrote.
Born on Sept. 9, 1924, in Salt Lake City, President Nelson graduated from high school at 16, then enrolled at the University of Utah, where he earned a bachelor’s degree at 20 and a medical degree at 22.
He married Dantzel White in 1945 and they had 10 children, nine girls and a boy. After Dantzel died in 2005, President Nelson married Wendy Watson in 2006.
President Nelson embarked on a pioneering medical career beginning with a medical residency and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. He was part of the Minnesota research team that developed the heart-lung machine. The machine’s cardiopulmonary bypass procedure made possible the first human open-heart surgery.
President Nelson then returned to Utah, where he built his own heart-lung machine and became the third surgeon to perform open heart surgery and the first west of the Mississippi River. He trained hundreds of heart surgeons in Utah and around the world, serving as a visiting professor in China, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile.
In 1972, he operated on future church President Spencer W. Kimball, replacing a defective aortic valve with a prosthetic and completing a coronary artery bypass graft.
President Nelson ended his medical practice in 1984 when President Kimball called him to become an apostle of Jesus Christ. His 29-year medical career was followed by 24 years as an apostle.
President Nelson has been the prophet and president for six years, since the death of his predecessor, President Thomas S. Monson, in January 2018.
“I declare my devotion to God our Eternal Father, and to his Son, Jesus Christ,” President Nelson said then. “I know them, love them, and pledge to serve them — and you — with every remaining breath of my life.”
Live interpretation will be available in Arabic, Cantonese, Cebuano, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Samoan, Spanish, Tagalog and Tongan.