This is the fourth in a series of articles this week about the Book of Mormon. (See special issue of the Liahona and Ensign magazines about the Book of Mormon, 2nd Annual Book of Mormon YouTube Challenge, and Additional Ways to Share the Book of Mormon.)
The Church has also updated the page about the Book of Mormon on LDS.org at bookofmormon.lds.org.
LDS Living magazine published an article in their September/October issue by Dennis Gaunt titled “Get Teens to Read the Book of Mormon.” Here are five ideas to help increase teens’ interest in reading the Book of Mormon:
- Make it matter. Help them see what the book has to do with their lives. Show them how the principles apply to them.
- Make it fun. A little humor can go a long way to breathing some life into the people of the Book of Mormon.
- Make it spiritual. Bear your testimony of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon and encourage them to find the truth for themselves.
- Make it a group effort. Involve your teens in studying the doctrine, including the words of the living prophets.
- Make it about Christ. Help them to see that the main purpose of the book is to teach the world about Jesus Christ.
Make it pertinent to their lives. I know that reading the Book of Mormon on my own wasn’t until someone pointed out to me that I could know the answer to my spiritual questions if I just read it at least once. Most teenagers are both lazy (prone to least resistance behavior) and curious, so try to get their interests and concerns out in the open and how the Book of Mormon can help them.
If you can get them to number 1, then the others will fall in place on their own.
Heaven knows that I had trouble reading the Book of Mormon in my teen years. I knew that I should read it and that it would bless my life, but I was so bored by the archaic prose! It eventually fell into place, however, especially in the past couple years. Thanks for writing this, it will really help to reference to when I’m a parent someday. From my perspective (that of one who recently graduated from teendom) I’d say a way to make it relevant to a teenager is to play to their sense of “cool”. Make scripture study something “cool”. How you do that is up to you, I guess. That, and don’t make it a burden. As a kid, my family would get up at six in the morning to read scriptures, and in my comatose, early-morning state, I wouldn’t get anything out of it. I soak in the material much easier later in the day, when I’m not brain-dead and can actually think about and discuss what I’m reading. Last, I’d say that it’s really not that important how MUCH you read in one sitting as opposed to how much you take in from it. Some of my greatest moments of study have been ones where I was reading seven chapters at once, but delving deeply into the handful of verses I did read and cross-referencing them, marking, taking notes. At such moments, the Spirit is very powerful for me.