Comments on: Guest Post- Taking Six Years to Teach the Book of Mormon

By: Kary

Kary — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 03:49:12 +0000

I have also been teaching an adult “Institute” class for about 15 years. We go slowly too–and I was feeling guilty for taking 3 years for the Book of Mormon! Thanks for giving me permission to go as thoroughly as we want through this wonderful book. We have also studied the Doctrine & Covenants (2.5 years) and the Pearl of Great Price (a year?), and church history, about 1820 to 1978 (2 years–that was so interesting to study, especially the post-1847 history that we usually ignore). There are about 40-50 of us in the class, many have been coming for years and years. I love meeting for 90 minutes every week with these wonderful people–I’m sure I’ve learned far more from them than they have from me. I’m so glad there are other places in the church with classes like this!

By: Athena

Athena — Wed, 27 May 2015 22:21:17 +0000

Compared with others of you, I’ve been rushing headlong through the scriptures in my stake’s adult institute class. We spent the first three years on the Old Testament and got through about a third of the chapters. (Before plunging into the OT itself, I took about three months to frame the class with an introduction to the King Follett discourse for a long view, then the atonement, the Sermon on the Mount, and the concept of Zion.) The resource I used most was the Jewish Study Bible. Several people in this small class said those three years changed who they are.

In the last two years we’ve studied the Book of Mormon and are now into King Benjamin’s address. The Old Testament studies greatly facilitated my approach to the Book of Mormon, and Joe Spencer’s notes on the Feast blog have been a fabulous resource. I anticipate actually finishing the Book of Mormon within the next 5-6 years. This experience appears to be changing all of us in the class. What a book.

By: Julie M. Smith

Julie M. Smith — Mon, 25 May 2015 15:30:38 +0000

I just spent two years teaching a one-hour-per-week online class for the women in my stake. It was called “A Closer Look at the Life of Jesus Christ.” We made it through nine chapters of Mark in those two years. I loved doing it, of course, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much the class enjoyed it as well. Reading closely is an important skill for enjoying the scriptures.

This can be duplicated in any church class to an extent: instead of covering all five (or whatever number of) stories in the lesson, pick 2-3 verses from one of the stories and focus on those.

By: Pacumeni

Pacumeni — Mon, 25 May 2015 05:29:25 +0000

Ten years ago, I was called to teach an adult institute class for the wards in our area. (By year two, I think stake leaders forgot we existed: it is a small class.) We started working through the Book of Mormon much as described in this post. Though not attended by the university students who have their own, more closely supervised classes, our class meets once a week for 75 minutes whenever the local university is in session. This year, we made it to and through Helaman chapter 5. The Book of Mormon amply rewards this kind of close reading. I have a couple thousand pages of teaching notes and have published several articles based on things discovered while preparing for the class in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies and the Interpreter. When I started, Brant Gardner’s commentary was available only online. It has been very useful, as was Grant Hardy’s Understanding the Book of Mormon once it was published and Allen C. Miner’s online commentary which I discovered this past year.

Having read the Book of Mormon many times before I got this calling, I already loved it well, but my love and respect has grown year by year, chapter by chapter, verse by verse as the magnitude of its literary excellence and spiritual power has been unfolded to me and the students in the course of our intense study. So I can affirm from personal experience the value of the approach taken here. If we continue at our current pace, we will complete the book after fourteen years of close reading, but it may take longer. Our pace has slowed as we have developed an ever greater appreciation of how much there is to find iin the Book of Mormon.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 24 May 2015 16:58:22 +0000

I would love to hear of there are any take aways that could be applied to Sunday school. Or does the size of the class and time constraints create to much of a challenge?

By: Clay Cook

Clay Cook — Sun, 24 May 2015 15:09:08 +0000

I just finished a two year course in our stake on the BoM. I also used Brant Gardeners commentary as a bases for my study. It adds such a great perspective to the BoM. Continually throughout the course I was frustrated by by two things, first even though the course was two years long there was not time to really dig into many things and a lot was skipped over. Second, the instructors were good people but the classes seemed to become more sermon like than what I had hoped for. Non the less having been away from the church for 20 years this study of the BoM was one of the things that was instrumental in my coming back. I personally credit Brant for most of that however with his guidance and perspective I was able to see and understand things that made the BoM more real and authentic for me. I often thought it wold be nice to be able to conduct the class more like a graduate seminar by going through the BoM verse by verse. Now I am going to attempt a study of Isaiah while at the same time gong through the BoM again. I wish I could have been in your class. Thanks

By: Kylie

Kylie — Sun, 24 May 2015 13:56:38 +0000

You are inspiring, Ben’s Mom. I wish I lived in your stake. It sounds like there was some (much?) rotation in class members. Did you have to continually re-explain the approach? Did people just join in where you were and move forward? I take it that you personally decided what to study each week and how much to cover…did you create a schedule or just go week by week?

By: Kevin Barney

Kevin Barney — Sun, 24 May 2015 12:30:09 +0000

I could relate to this. Back when I taught “Institute” (which is what everyone called it, but in reality it was stake adult continuing education, not specifically aimed at college-age students), I taught a BoM class, and a semester turned into a year, and one year turned into two. There were no constraints on us, so we just kept going. (We didn’t finish anything; I don’t specifically recall, but I don’t know if we even made it out of 1 Nephi.) It was a great experience.

When I was first called to teach GD, the curriculum was rotating two-year classes, so you would get through the Standard Works in eight years. There were some advantages to that slower pace that were lost when the curriculum was changed to one-year courses with a four-year rotation.

By: Ben S.

Ben S. — Sun, 24 May 2015 12:13:28 +0000

See my correction. I added the time to her post, so no one would think this was a short class. Mom may have been gone for three hours every Tuesday morning, but the class itself was only 90 minutes.

By: Frank McIntyre

Frank McIntyre — Sun, 24 May 2015 10:41:06 +0000

very interesting. My first thought was it says a lot about the teacher and students to keep a three hour a week class going successfully that long.