As directed by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the Church’s General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to be updated as needed to provide ministerial guidance, clarity, and inspiration to local leaders.

Some of the updates in the latest release are listed below. More details about all the updates are listed in the “Summary of Recent Updates” at the beginning of the handbook.

• Clarified age requirements for attending youth activities (see 10.2.1.3, 11.2.1.3, 20.4, 20.7.2).
• Added a new section providing guidance for baptism and confirmation preparation meetings (see 12.1.8).
• Included new instruction that a member of the Primary presidency now attends missionary coordination meetings and temple and family history coordination meetings (see 12.3.2).
• Clarified information about calling patriarchs and receiving patriarchal blessings (see 6.6, 18.17, 38.2.10).
• Clarified the purpose of weekly missionary coordination meetings, emphasizing the use of the Covenant Path Progress report and aligning with Preach My Gospel: A Guide to Sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ (see 23.4).
• Clarified and updated instructions about welfare assistance (see 22.3.2, 22.3.3, and 22.5.1.1).
• Revised guidelines regarding editions and translations of the Bible (see 38.8.40).
• Added a new section containing guidelines for using artificial intelligence appropriately (see 38.8.47).

These revisions have been published in the following languages on ChurchofJesusChrist.org and in the Gospel Library app: Albanian, Bislama, Cambodian, Cebuano, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kiribati, Korean, Malagasy, Marshallese, Mongolian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tahitian, Thai, Tongan, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Search Assistant

Once you sign in with your Church account, you will see the search assistant button at the bottom right of the screen when viewing General Handbook content. The search assistant is available in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

This search assistant can analyze your questions and summarize the relevant information from the handbook. Because generative artificial intelligence can sometimes give an incorrect answer, you should always click the link it provides to the relevant sections of the handbook to verify the answer.