At the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City in April 2024, Keith B. McMullin stood on a stage holding a glass trophy, 82 years old and only months removed from a job most people would have called a second career. Bishop McMullin, who spent seventeen years inside the senior leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before running one of Utah's largest media and business organizations, died Wednesday, September 30, 2026, according to the Church News and the Deseret News. He was 85.

He was born August 18, 1941, in St. George, Utah, and grew up in the small Washington County town of Leeds before his family settled in Salt Lake City. He studied banking and finance at the University of Utah, setting his coursework aside for a call to the South German Mission as a young man. Within months a realignment of the Church's German missions placed him in the West German Mission instead, where he eventually served as a counselor in the mission presidency. He married Carolyn Jean Gibbs, who had also served a mission in Germany, in the Salt Lake Temple in June 1964.

In 1966 he took a job as an investment and financial analyst for Ford Motor Company, which moved the newly married couple to Michigan. There he served as a branch president for the Church and became the first bishop of the Ypsilanti congregation once it grew large enough to become a ward. Back in Utah by the end of the decade, he ran small businesses for several years before joining the Church's Welfare Services Department in 1975 as director of financial and administrative services. He was named managing director of Welfare Services in 1985, the last of his twenty years in the department.

In 1980 he and Carolyn went back to Germany, this time with Keith presiding over the Germany Frankfurt Mission for three years, in the same country where each of them had served as young missionaries two decades earlier. On December 27, 1995, he was called as second counselor in the Presiding Bishopric, the three man body that oversees the Church's global temporal affairs and welfare programs, serving alongside Presiding Bishop H. David Burton for the next seventeen years. Burton later said McMullin "was always inclined to think in terms of the needs of people" and that "when deliberating decisions, he thought in terms of how to benefit people."

When he left the Presiding Bishopric in 2012, McMullin did not slow down. The Church named him president and chief executive officer of Deseret Management Corporation, the holding company for the Deseret News, KSL, Bonneville International, Bonneville Communications, Deseret Book and Deseret Digital Media, according to the Deseret News. He ran it for nearly twelve years, a stretch the company later credited with turning its media properties into innovators in their fields, including an international "Faith and Media" initiative. Sheri Dew, the company's executive vice president and chief content officer, called him "one of a kind" as a leader: "As a boss, he always had my back. As a leader, he had an uncanny knack for pointing the way while being sensitive to the needs of all involved." Gary Porter, a DMC senior vice president, remembered him as "always so kind" and said he "was really wise in the counsel he gave."

McMullin retired as DMC's president and chief executive on December 1, 2023, at age 82, handing the role to Jeff Simpson. "I have great confidence in Jeff Simpson's ability to build on DMC's strengths and lead it into the future," McMullin said at the time, according to the Deseret News. Four months later, Utah Governor Spencer Cox presented him with the Utah Business Leader Community Impact Award at the One Utah Summit. Accepting it, McMullin said he had first thought "there were many people more suited to this type of award," then decided the honor really belonged to the state he had spent his career serving: "Utah is an incredible place," he said. "It not only holds a very high ranking as far as its economic performance, but it has a morale and cultural heritage that is influencing the entire nation and will continue to do so." He urged other business leaders to "study it, embrace it and adopt it," according to the Deseret News. He received the South Valley Chamber's Titan Award that same year.

McMullin and Carolyn raised eight children: Kirk, Chad, Johanna, Margaret, Jennifer, David, Nathan and Nannette. By the time of his death the family had grown to include 19 grandchildren, according to his official Church biography. Of the family he and Carolyn built, McMullin once said plainly, "There is nothing flashy about us, but we have been blessed with a wonderful family."

McMullin spent six decades moving between two kinds of stewardship: first the Church's welfare programs and temporal affairs, later the newsroom, broadcast and publishing operations that carry the Deseret name across Utah. The small Michigan congregation he helped grow into a ward, the mission he presided over in Frankfurt, and the media company he handed to Jeff Simpson still innovating all trace back to the same habit, visible from his first mission call to his last public appearance at a lectern in Salt Lake City: a readiness to take on one more assignment rather than step back.