The church currently uses three manuals for the Young Women Sunday lessons. Each manual contains a unit labeled “Being Involved in Missionary Work” with either two or three lessons. The titles of those lessons, along with their objectives, are as follows:
Young Women Manual 1
Lesson 20: Reach Out to Others
Each young woman will extend friendship to young women of her own age and encourage them to take part in Church activities and meetings
Lesson 21: A Righteous Example Influences Others
Each young woman will set a righteous example for others
Posted below is a lesson discussed in the Family Relations (Sunday School) class in 1947, from The Latter-day Saint Family, by Harold T. Christensen. This comes from the same book as the post Lonely, Bitter, Maladjusted, Highly Disagreeable, Sour, Gay and Insane: The Unmarried Saint in the Pew Next to You. (I point that out because while we had a good time disagreeing with him and picking out the flaws in that lesson, Christensen was a respected sociologist and his writing on other topics may very well be right on target. It’s fine to disagree with anything in this lesson, but it’s also fine to agree with anything, too – please don’t let our conclusions about that lesson interfere with a fair reading of this one. Thanks.)
1947 was just about the time that my mother and the other adults who shaped my early church life would have been getting their first adult lessons in modern women’s issues and “scientific” theories of women’s roles and nature. Lessons like this must have shaped my world in profound ways. It’s one thing to assume what women were being told in church or in the wider culture; I think it’s very helpful to have concrete examples of what they were in fact being taught.
With the motto “Real Service Consists in Losing Self for the Good of Others,” the Primary lessons of 1923 focused on the theme of “An Open Door to All.” Most of the pictures published in the Children’s Friend that month for use as class visual aids demonstrate hospitality: visitors to a 1923 home, newly arriving immigrants in Church history, the introduction of foreign converts to a missionary’s family at home (in this case, the hospitality went both ways: the converts had hosted the missionary, and now the missionary’s family was hosting them), the welcome given to wagon companies arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, and — of particular interest to Keepa readers — the greeting of tourists at the Salt Lake Auto Camp.
I’ve fallen behind in this series; my apologies to anyone who might have been skimming through them in preparation for teaching. I intend to resume and catch up for the sake of completeness, even though the moment has passed …
Lesson 25: Priesthood: “The Power of Godliness”
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1934: Missionary Sunday School Lessons
Lesson 31: Priesthood
“Ordination of men to the ministry, as sanctioned by scriptural precedent and established by direct revelation of God’s will, is to be effected through the gift of prophecy and by the imposition of hands of those who are in authority.” – Talmage, Articles of Faith, p. 182.
No doubt Primary leaders saw “Agricultural Growth” as an appropriate theme for the classes of November 1923, because agriculture brought to mind thoughts of abundance and thanksgiving — indeed, the motto for November’s lessons was “A Thankful and a Cheerful Heart Offers the Worship Most Acceptable to God.” Agriculture also fell under the umbrella theme for the last four months of 1923, “The Latter-day Saints, a Progressive People.”
Below are the six line drawings published in the Children’s Friend that month for use by teachers as visual aids. With lives so far removed from direct contact with agriculture, and technical progress over the past 85 years, I wonder whether today’s children would recognize the activities and objects that teachers in 1923 took for granted, much less the pioneer agricultural activities pictured here.
An occasional subject for blog discussion is the apparent* difficulties some have with their first attendance at the temple. The highly symbolic/allegorical/representational method of presentation is unfamiliar to those unused to considering symbols, and the limited ritual of our usual weekly worship is so familiar and so often repeated that many don’t even notice its formalism anymore. These discussions sometimes include complaints that the church does little or nothing to prepare first-time temple-goers to understand the presentation.
With that complaint fresh in mind after another such blog discussion, I was interested to discover this lesson taught in 1935 as one of the Book of Mormon Sunday School lessons for high school-age classes. This lesson introduces the ideas of symbols as carriers of thought, emphasizes the need to become familiar with a symbolic system in order to understand its message, and dissects several familiar LDS ordinances to illustrate the functioning of signs and symbols.
What an odd theme for the Primary lessons of October 1923! Well, the overall theme for the last four months of the year was “The Latter-day Saints, a Progressive People,” and the motto for October was “He Conquers Who Endures.” That may help us understand the place of this lesson within the study of Church history — which, in the perspective of 1923, was inextricably tied to the development of Salt Lake City.
Ironically, all the ultra-modern images illustrating the magnificent progress of 1923 appear as quaint to us as the pioneer pictures do.
Lesson 23: “Seek Learning, Even by Study and Also by Faith”
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1933: Gospel Messages
Lesson 4: How We Get Spiritual Knowledge
That young man of whom mention was made three lessons ago as having had an inferiority-complex on the subject of religion, had in reality a far deeper reason for his action than that which he gave to his bishop. He may not have been able to state it in so many words, but it was there none the less.
This lesson from the 1945 missionary prep Sunday School class describes an important tool in the kit of the missionary in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It follows a similar lesson on “Cottage Meetings” posted here recently.