I was asked to speak in Stake Conference two weeks ago about using the Come Follow Me program. I thought some of you might like to see what I came up with also. So, without further ado, here it is.
President Meneses approached me about four weeks ago and asked if he could talk with me for a few minutes. I immediately said, “Do I want to talk with you?” Because generally if the stake presidency wants to talk with you, you might think you need to go do something else. Anyway, he asked if I could talk today about gospel learning in the home and how we use the Come Follow Me program. When I got home that afternoon, I was starting to write down ideas of what to say and one of my boys wandered up, saw what I was doing and then asked incredulously, “Wait, you’re giving a talk? In Stake Conference?” I told him I was and that I was going to talk about gospel learning in the home because someone thought I had it figured out. . . We laughed.
In case you haven’t learned this yet, no one has it figured out and we are all just doing our best with this beautiful, messy, wonderful life Heavenly Father has given us.
Some of the ideas I will share today will work right now for your family. Some of them won’t. I hope that if something does not sound like it will work for you, it will spark an idea of what will. Every family is different and gospel learning will look different for everyone. For example, in my family, we have eight children ages 15 to 4. Your family may have no children, or just a few, or a larger age range like mine. What works for us, may or may not work for you, but use it as a stepping stone to find out what does work.
Step one in gospel learning or teaching in the home is to pray and ponder. Pray to know how, what, and when you are supposed to be teaching. You will need to decide or clarify your priorities because when you have determined your priorities, you will more easily be able to answer the questions - “What do I say yes to?” “What do I say no to?” and “Where do I give my time?” Included in the pondering process can be counseling with spouses, children, or other people who may be able to give you some new ideas about how to teach the gospel in your home. Step two is to make a plan and follow through, but be flexible.
We homeschool and I have always done a “religion class” with my kids. It is one of the first things we do when we start school because I want my kids to see that the gospel is important to us. It is a priority for us. I also want my kids to know that religion, and talking about the gospel, is not just a Sunday thing. We are not Zoramites with a Rameumptum. The gospel should be something that permeates our daily life and enters into normal conversation. We are still working on that. But because it is one of our priorities, we do daily gospel teaching.
One other gospel learning activity we do is watch a conference talk on Fridays as our religious study for the day. The reason for that is this. I was reading the Ensign three or four years ago and there was a story in there about two friends. We’ll call them Anna and Maria because I don’t remember their names. Anna was a member of the church and she told her friend Maria, who was not a member, that there was a prophet on the earth today. Someone who spoke for God. Maria got very excited and asked “What has he said recently?” Anna couldn’t remember and was embarrassed but this helped her to change and study the prophet’s messages more faithfully. This story really hit me because I felt the same as Anna. I didn’t remember what the prophet had said recently either. We watched General Conference and I took notes, but the notes got lost and we didn’t really study or talk about General Conference after that. As I was pondering, I thought about how we already had a religion time set up in our school setting. I decided we would watch a conference talk and that Fridays would be the best day to do it. When I have had a good night’s rest, sometimes we even discuss the talk a little bit. If I’m tired that day, we might just go on to the next subject. I know some of my kids don’t always appreciate that time, but by doing it regularly, I’m letting them know, This is important to us. We use our time on this.
When our church leaders first introduced the Come Follow Me program, I was pondering about how to use it. I never knelt down and said a formal prayer, but I was kind of having informal conversations in my head with Heavenly Father and pondering about what felt right. As I said, we homeschool and I already was using a religion program that I was happy with. I also wanted Come Follow Me to be a year round family program that we did at a time when my husband could be home as well. I was talking to my someone about this and she said, “You know, the principle is that you are learning and teaching the gospel at home. You are doing that with your other program, so you may not need to add in Come Follow Me.” I understood her point, but I didn’t feel that was right for my family. I had faith that Come Follow Me was inspired and that we should do it. I also didn’t think I could produce a full hour long lesson every Sunday for my family so I didn’t feel that idea of another church class at home on Sunday was right for us. As I was pondering over a couple of weeks, I realized that we really had let our evening scripture reading slide. My husband had started us on evening scripture study several years ago and we had finished the Book of Mormon a few months before. We just hadn’t started a new book of scripture so I decided Come Follow Me would fit in as our evening scripture study. I took a couple days to go through the manual and plan out what we would read, or watch as a video, for every evening of the year. I knew that we probably wouldn’t get to everything that I had written down, but you have to start with a plan. I emailed our schedule to all the kids and my husband, printed it off, and put it in the front of the scriptures we read out of. Making this schedule has given us both an end goal and a starting place. It is a starting place because it gives us a basic schedule to follow without any other resources such as fun handouts, games, or acting out the stories. It is also an end goal because I knew we probably wouldn’t be able to read every single night, but I could try to accomplish that.
The first half of the New Testament was pretty easy. The scripture stories were familiar to my kids and there were videos to watch that illustrated the parables. Then, we came to Paul. I really respect Paul and think that he must have been an amazing, tireless person, but I have a hard time reading and understanding his epistles. One week, I was looking ahead at Romans 1-6 and, knowing that I had a hard time with Paul in the past, I decided to read those chapters and see how they went for me. As I was reading, I realized, My kids are going to get nothing out of reading this and I am not understanding what is going on and I won’t be able to teach them what is going on. So, again, I was pondering. Not fasting and praying, just thinking about what to do to make things work for my family. As I was pondering this problem, I remembered something I had read on Facebook a week earlier. People were talking about how they were using Come Follow Me and one lady said that she noticed each week in the manual, there were usually 5 subsections. So they picked one subsection each day and read that little bit of scriptures and used the manual to help understand them. When I read it, I thought, Oh, that’s nice that that works for that family, but I want my family to read every single verse in the New Testament. But now, we were at Paul. . . and I knew something needed to change. When I remembered that lady’s comment, I felt that was what would be best for my family. I had to humble myself because I had put myself above someone else and I had to let go of my perfect little box of reading the whole New Testament to go to what works for us. Some days I read the scriptures beforehand and I know we could read the chapter and get something out of it. Some days I look at the chapter and think, “I don’t know what Paul is saying in this letter, so we are going to use the manual much more and read shorter sections of scriptures.” So, be flexible. Things work until they don’t and then you might have to change. Also, the second night that we started studying in the smaller sections, my 15-year-old told me, “I like reading this way. We have more time to talk about the concept instead of just reading.” If your 15-year-old says they like something, pay attention.
Sometimes we use the Come Follow Me manual as our Family Home Evening lesson as well. Sometimes on Wednesdays when the older kids have youth activities, we have the younger kids watch a video or do a more simple lesson and then go to bed. Then, when the older kids come home, they get their scriptures and we have a lesson with more discussion. Some nights we draw a picture of what we are reading or write down important words that we want to remember and we put this poster up in our home.
I keep the Come Follow Me manual and the scriptures on our front table so they are out all the time. If I have a few minutes, I can pick them up quickly and look at what the lesson is for the next week or review what we are talking about this week. I can also look over my schedule easily. Many times on Sundays I have time to watch a Youtube program called Don’t Miss This which helps me understand the scriptures for the next week. I have made these things a priority so I find the time to study. Before I call everyone down for scripture study, I will pick up the manual to look at the subsection we are reading to see if there is a quote or a question that I really want to share with the kids.
I know other families that have really cute boards that have a scripture for the week as well as a picture that gets changed every week. I love the idea, but I don’t have a place to hang another board and I knew that I would fall behind in replacing the picture and scriptures every week. I have another friend that has ten kids and she said this. “We just keep it super simple. We have kids read their scriptures for Come Follow Me during the day. Each night we gather and open up for discussion. The 3 year old always says, "Jesus loves everyone" or "Jesus died for us." The 6 year old talks about the photo we studied together earlier. Some of the littles like the 4 year old repeat a scripture. Then the older ones ask questions or share something they learned. My 14 year old usually has notes to share or takes notes while we talk. It is super simple with little to no prep. If no one has anything they want to share we just pick one of the paragraphs and read and talk about it or watch one of the corresponding videos. Since we do this during the week we now read the Book of Mormon on Sunday for 30ish minutes. “
I just read on Facebook a comment from a mother of six who felt like she had to prepare four elaborate lessons to touch each age range in her family and she felt like she was failing because that wasn’t happening. Heavenly Father does not want us to feel like failures. He wants us to do the best we can and to use the gospel in our daily lives. We don’t need elaborate lessons; we need gospel discussions. We do not do the convincing or converting. The Spirit does. We need to bring the Spirit into our lives and pay attention to the promptings and feelings we receive. If we are not sure how we should start teaching the gospel in the home, start talking about something we heard at church or something we have read in the Ensign or the scriptures and ask the other members of your family what they think about that concept. But just start.
I bear my testimony that the more we talk about the gospel at home and the more we study, the more the Spirit will be with us and will tutor us. The gospel is simple. Love deeply, believe Christ, give abundantly. Pray for direction, make a plan, and start moving in the direction the Spirit leads us.
In case you haven’t learned this yet, no one has it figured out and we are all just doing our best with this beautiful, messy, wonderful life Heavenly Father has given us.
Some of the ideas I will share today will work right now for your family. Some of them won’t. I hope that if something does not sound like it will work for you, it will spark an idea of what will. Every family is different and gospel learning will look different for everyone. For example, in my family, we have eight children ages 15 to 4. Your family may have no children, or just a few, or a larger age range like mine. What works for us, may or may not work for you, but use it as a stepping stone to find out what does work.
Step one in gospel learning or teaching in the home is to pray and ponder. Pray to know how, what, and when you are supposed to be teaching. You will need to decide or clarify your priorities because when you have determined your priorities, you will more easily be able to answer the questions - “What do I say yes to?” “What do I say no to?” and “Where do I give my time?” Included in the pondering process can be counseling with spouses, children, or other people who may be able to give you some new ideas about how to teach the gospel in your home. Step two is to make a plan and follow through, but be flexible.
We homeschool and I have always done a “religion class” with my kids. It is one of the first things we do when we start school because I want my kids to see that the gospel is important to us. It is a priority for us. I also want my kids to know that religion, and talking about the gospel, is not just a Sunday thing. We are not Zoramites with a Rameumptum. The gospel should be something that permeates our daily life and enters into normal conversation. We are still working on that. But because it is one of our priorities, we do daily gospel teaching.
One other gospel learning activity we do is watch a conference talk on Fridays as our religious study for the day. The reason for that is this. I was reading the Ensign three or four years ago and there was a story in there about two friends. We’ll call them Anna and Maria because I don’t remember their names. Anna was a member of the church and she told her friend Maria, who was not a member, that there was a prophet on the earth today. Someone who spoke for God. Maria got very excited and asked “What has he said recently?” Anna couldn’t remember and was embarrassed but this helped her to change and study the prophet’s messages more faithfully. This story really hit me because I felt the same as Anna. I didn’t remember what the prophet had said recently either. We watched General Conference and I took notes, but the notes got lost and we didn’t really study or talk about General Conference after that. As I was pondering, I thought about how we already had a religion time set up in our school setting. I decided we would watch a conference talk and that Fridays would be the best day to do it. When I have had a good night’s rest, sometimes we even discuss the talk a little bit. If I’m tired that day, we might just go on to the next subject. I know some of my kids don’t always appreciate that time, but by doing it regularly, I’m letting them know, This is important to us. We use our time on this.
When our church leaders first introduced the Come Follow Me program, I was pondering about how to use it. I never knelt down and said a formal prayer, but I was kind of having informal conversations in my head with Heavenly Father and pondering about what felt right. As I said, we homeschool and I already was using a religion program that I was happy with. I also wanted Come Follow Me to be a year round family program that we did at a time when my husband could be home as well. I was talking to my someone about this and she said, “You know, the principle is that you are learning and teaching the gospel at home. You are doing that with your other program, so you may not need to add in Come Follow Me.” I understood her point, but I didn’t feel that was right for my family. I had faith that Come Follow Me was inspired and that we should do it. I also didn’t think I could produce a full hour long lesson every Sunday for my family so I didn’t feel that idea of another church class at home on Sunday was right for us. As I was pondering over a couple of weeks, I realized that we really had let our evening scripture reading slide. My husband had started us on evening scripture study several years ago and we had finished the Book of Mormon a few months before. We just hadn’t started a new book of scripture so I decided Come Follow Me would fit in as our evening scripture study. I took a couple days to go through the manual and plan out what we would read, or watch as a video, for every evening of the year. I knew that we probably wouldn’t get to everything that I had written down, but you have to start with a plan. I emailed our schedule to all the kids and my husband, printed it off, and put it in the front of the scriptures we read out of. Making this schedule has given us both an end goal and a starting place. It is a starting place because it gives us a basic schedule to follow without any other resources such as fun handouts, games, or acting out the stories. It is also an end goal because I knew we probably wouldn’t be able to read every single night, but I could try to accomplish that.
The first half of the New Testament was pretty easy. The scripture stories were familiar to my kids and there were videos to watch that illustrated the parables. Then, we came to Paul. I really respect Paul and think that he must have been an amazing, tireless person, but I have a hard time reading and understanding his epistles. One week, I was looking ahead at Romans 1-6 and, knowing that I had a hard time with Paul in the past, I decided to read those chapters and see how they went for me. As I was reading, I realized, My kids are going to get nothing out of reading this and I am not understanding what is going on and I won’t be able to teach them what is going on. So, again, I was pondering. Not fasting and praying, just thinking about what to do to make things work for my family. As I was pondering this problem, I remembered something I had read on Facebook a week earlier. People were talking about how they were using Come Follow Me and one lady said that she noticed each week in the manual, there were usually 5 subsections. So they picked one subsection each day and read that little bit of scriptures and used the manual to help understand them. When I read it, I thought, Oh, that’s nice that that works for that family, but I want my family to read every single verse in the New Testament. But now, we were at Paul. . . and I knew something needed to change. When I remembered that lady’s comment, I felt that was what would be best for my family. I had to humble myself because I had put myself above someone else and I had to let go of my perfect little box of reading the whole New Testament to go to what works for us. Some days I read the scriptures beforehand and I know we could read the chapter and get something out of it. Some days I look at the chapter and think, “I don’t know what Paul is saying in this letter, so we are going to use the manual much more and read shorter sections of scriptures.” So, be flexible. Things work until they don’t and then you might have to change. Also, the second night that we started studying in the smaller sections, my 15-year-old told me, “I like reading this way. We have more time to talk about the concept instead of just reading.” If your 15-year-old says they like something, pay attention.
Sometimes we use the Come Follow Me manual as our Family Home Evening lesson as well. Sometimes on Wednesdays when the older kids have youth activities, we have the younger kids watch a video or do a more simple lesson and then go to bed. Then, when the older kids come home, they get their scriptures and we have a lesson with more discussion. Some nights we draw a picture of what we are reading or write down important words that we want to remember and we put this poster up in our home.
I keep the Come Follow Me manual and the scriptures on our front table so they are out all the time. If I have a few minutes, I can pick them up quickly and look at what the lesson is for the next week or review what we are talking about this week. I can also look over my schedule easily. Many times on Sundays I have time to watch a Youtube program called Don’t Miss This which helps me understand the scriptures for the next week. I have made these things a priority so I find the time to study. Before I call everyone down for scripture study, I will pick up the manual to look at the subsection we are reading to see if there is a quote or a question that I really want to share with the kids.
I know other families that have really cute boards that have a scripture for the week as well as a picture that gets changed every week. I love the idea, but I don’t have a place to hang another board and I knew that I would fall behind in replacing the picture and scriptures every week. I have another friend that has ten kids and she said this. “We just keep it super simple. We have kids read their scriptures for Come Follow Me during the day. Each night we gather and open up for discussion. The 3 year old always says, "Jesus loves everyone" or "Jesus died for us." The 6 year old talks about the photo we studied together earlier. Some of the littles like the 4 year old repeat a scripture. Then the older ones ask questions or share something they learned. My 14 year old usually has notes to share or takes notes while we talk. It is super simple with little to no prep. If no one has anything they want to share we just pick one of the paragraphs and read and talk about it or watch one of the corresponding videos. Since we do this during the week we now read the Book of Mormon on Sunday for 30ish minutes. “
I just read on Facebook a comment from a mother of six who felt like she had to prepare four elaborate lessons to touch each age range in her family and she felt like she was failing because that wasn’t happening. Heavenly Father does not want us to feel like failures. He wants us to do the best we can and to use the gospel in our daily lives. We don’t need elaborate lessons; we need gospel discussions. We do not do the convincing or converting. The Spirit does. We need to bring the Spirit into our lives and pay attention to the promptings and feelings we receive. If we are not sure how we should start teaching the gospel in the home, start talking about something we heard at church or something we have read in the Ensign or the scriptures and ask the other members of your family what they think about that concept. But just start.
I bear my testimony that the more we talk about the gospel at home and the more we study, the more the Spirit will be with us and will tutor us. The gospel is simple. Love deeply, believe Christ, give abundantly. Pray for direction, make a plan, and start moving in the direction the Spirit leads us.