Over the course of four years, a seminary student has had the opportunity to memorize scripture verses. Click on this link to learn more about Scripture Mastery verses. The classes are free, and the Church Educational System provides manuals and student materials, except for scriptures. Released-time seminary is offered in areas where there are large populations of LDS students and where laws to do not forbid it.
Seminary classes are attended during school hours in a Church-owned building near the school. The teachers are full-time and are employed by the Church Educational System.
It really made a difference for me. With all of the garbage that they get in their high school classes, we just feel it's really important that they get some reinforcement out of the scriptures every morning. To that end, the Padillas make seminary a family experience every morning. The whole family gets up, has breakfast together, reads scriptures and has family prayer before the high school-age children go to seminary.
Jabari Parker of Chicago is widely considered one of the best high school basketball players in the United States. Recently, however, The New York Times reported that "there also is a side to Jabari that does not attract the spotlight: the Mormon, who attends religious classes in the predawn hours three days a week.
The class then opened the Old Testament to Leviticus. Jabari even uses the lessons learned through his seminary classes in his conversation with the Times reporter: "He recalls the Genesis account of Abraham's willingness to obey God's command to sacrifice his son Isaac, a sacrifice cut short by divine intervention.
Such stories of faithful seminary students remind Chad H. Webb, administrator of Seminaries and Institutes for the church, that the goals and objectives of seminary haven't really changed a lot in years.
Merrill, who was a faculty member at the University of Utah, a church leader in the Granite High School neighborhood and the pioneer of that first class, hoped for the same results in the lives of young people that we hope for today," Webb said.
We hope that is what will happen in every seminary class today and forever. Start your day with the top stories you missed while you were sleeping. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies.
Print Subscriptions. Deseret News homepage. Filed under: Faith Mormon Times Utah. In David B. Armed with only a vague notion of how to launch the new venture, Brother Jones embarked for Southern California in earnest. He first worked tirelessly to secure the support of the local priesthood and then spent the rest of the summer of engaged in a whirlwind of preparations. He worked to find the right teachers, train them, and secure the proper facilities for the new venture.
The early-morning seminary program launched in September , less than five months after Joseph Fielding Smith met with the 10 stake presidents. During the first school year, six stakes participated with an enrollment of students in seven different classes. It was the attitude and the beauty of the young people. They wanted seminary to be good, and it was good. Most parents and Priesthood leaders were very supportive, but the kids really carried the program.
From simple beginnings in the six stakes of the Los Angeles area, the program spread to become the dominant delivery method for Church education today. Early-morning seminary was able to follow Church members throughout the country and meet the needs of LDS youth on a national level. William E. Berrett and religious education staff in the late s. Berrett is fifth from the left; standing immediately to his right is Boyd K.
Courtesy of Leland Bruderer. The s also saw a significant change in the leadership of Church education. In Commissioner Franklin L. West retired, having led the system for almost 20 years. He was replaced by Ernest L. Berrett, a teacher in the BYU Religion Department, to be the head of all religious education programs. Brother Berrett brought a different sensibility to the seminary and institute programs.
Except for a brief stint as an assistant attorney general in Alaska, he had spent all of his professional life writing and teaching in the seminary and institute programs. William Berrett was an exceptional teacher and writer, having authored a number of texts for use in seminary and institute. His experience with the system reached all the way back to the first summer trainings held under Adam S. In all of the teachers in the seminary and institute programs met at Brigham Young University.
The summer programs that had been started 30 years earlier began with General Authorities teaching the classes, and then eventually they evolved to include biblical scholars, such as professors from the University of Chicago.
Brother Berrett wanted a return to the basics. To facilitate this, he invited Elder Harold B. Lee to serve as the teacher. Reuben Clark. Where the summer schools of the s had focused on biblical archaeology, theology, and textual analysis, Elder Lee focused instead on the importance of faith and testimony.
Rather than emphasizing the scholarship of the teachers, Elder Lee placed the emphasis on protecting the faith of the students. Brother Berrett also surrounded himself with a strong support team. Packer, a seminary principal in Brigham City, Utah, as supervisors over the program.
Though the two new supervisors were unacquainted, they soon struck up a close friendship. They were closer than brothers. Seminary and institute continued to grow, but it still remained a close-knit organization. Boyd K. Brother Packer and I hired every man, interviewed them, knew them, tended them when they were new. As the traveling supervisors in the system, Brothers Tuttle and Packer were instrumental in training the teachers. Then comparing the statue to the Church, he continued:.
Regarding the Church,. I suppose if we look we can find flaws and abrasions and a chip missing here and there. I suppose we can see an aberration or an imperfection in a leader of the past or perhaps the present. Nonetheless, there is still absolute, hard-rock, undeniable, irrefutable proof, because the Church is what it is and because that someone, sometime, with supreme inspired spiritual genius set to work obediently under inspiration and organized it, and so it came into being.
It is best that we should enlarge ourselves to appreciate the beauty and genius of it, rather than debunk and look for the flaws. We are. Encouraged by Brother Berrett, seminary and institute administrators worked to gain a closer working relationship between the seminary and institute teachers and the leaders of the Church.
Theodore Tuttle was called as a member of the First Council of the Seventy in A few years later, when Boyd K. He also began encouraging teachers to seek advanced degrees.
He raised salaries and arranged for teachers to receive health insurance along with their employment. In a request arrived at Church headquarters from the president of the Brisbane Australia Stake for a seminary program. McKay and the Church Board of Education carefully considered the request and began looking for ways to take religious education into the international areas of the Church.
Elders A. Theodore Tuttle and Boyd K. Packer, now General Authorities, also strongly advocated for expanding the seminary and institute programs. Less than two months after his arrival as Area President in South America, a request arrived from Elder Tuttle to bring seminary to Uruguay.
Wilkinson and the First Presidency, William E. Berrett traveled to Europe in and again in , trying to find the best way to bring seminary into those countries. No school in any of the countries had enough LDS students for a released-time program, and a lack of transportation made early-morning programs infeasible. Brother Don Bond, pictured on the right, is shown here with Duane H. Banks, a local stake president, during the home-study pilot program in Davenport, Iowa.
Courtesy of Don Bond. The solution came through inspiration to a number of different people. Donald Wilson, a seminary teacher in Cardston, Canada, proposed a program where students studied the scriptures on their own time, occasionally meeting with a teacher and larger groups of their peers. The travel required could be reduced to weekly and monthly meetings.
Eberhard Jr. With the help of Elder Boyd K. Packer, the Church Board of Education approved a pilot study. One lone teacher, Donald R. Bond, was sent to the Midwest to test the program.
Brother Bond was only a fourth-year seminary teacher when he was pulled for the assignment, but he tackled the work with enthusiasm. One stake president gladly took off nearly a week of work just to drive Brother Bond around the area, personally introducing him to local leadership. The new program was launched in the fall of The whole program was taken as a grand experiment and required a phenomenal amount of work on the part of the curriculum staff.
It was hectic. Stringham, remembered visiting Don Bond in the field, writing the next lesson as he sat in the backseat of the car. Evaluations gave the new program enthusiastic marks. Elder Marion G. Romney was assigned to personally investigate the possibility, and Don Bond began receiving phone calls in which Elder Romney asked him several penetrating questions.
I was en route to Vincennes, Indiana. I pulled off the highway and found a secluded place where I knelt by the roadside and bore my solemn witness of the powerful impact I had personally felt from the students as they regularly associated with this daily scripture and gospel study; I prayed that this influence would be felt by the Brethren in the ongoing meeting being held at Church headquarters in Salt Lake City.
As I pulled back on the interstate, I had a feeling of certainty that President [N. Eldon] Tanner would see seminary in England within a few months. Before the end of the summer, the first teachers were assigned to introduce the seminary and institute programs to England and Australia. John Madsen. This photo was taken during his service as a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy.
Jaussi, a long-time seminary and institute veteran, to start the program in England and Australia, respectively. Shocked, he asked when he would leave. Other than a single meeting with Don Bond, they received no other formal training. It was a sacred privilege, a sacred trust. Brother Berrett personally accompanied the Madsens to England to introduce the program. He was a man who looked like a prophet, who talked like a prophet, and who had the bearing and dignity of a true patriarch.
He just was a man of wonderful dignity, and character, and spirit. After one week Brother Berrett returned home, and the Madsens set about the difficult task of making the arrangements for the program. There was no curriculum because it was still being written. When they finally arrived, Brother Madsen personally delivered the curriculum to every teacher in his stewardship.
Despite all these challenges, the Church members in England soon caught the vision. The response was even greater than Brother Madsen predicted, despite the lack of materials and training. Expecting to run only a home-study program, enough students were recruited for several early-morning classes. The first seminary class in Great Britain convened with 19 students at a. From that small beginning, both home-study and early-morning classes continued to spread. In England scripture chases became so popular that a national championship was held.
Another contingent of American teachers traveled to New Zealand the next year to start the programs there. The launch of the international programs was the crowning achievement of William E.
Along with Commissioner Maxwell came a complete changeover in the leadership of seminaries and institutes. Clarence F. Then he gave a classic sermon, just an absolute classic, on how we ought to support the administration, particularly the administration of the church. During the s the pace for seminaries and institutes accelerated. When Brother Berrett was appointed in , there were roughly 34, students, mostly in the Intermountain West.
Total institute enrollment was about 4, When Brother Berrett retired in , seminary enrollment had grown to , students and institute to nearly 50,, and the programs had taken their first step onto the global stage. New techniques in media began to be introduced, which also increased the effectiveness of the teachers. Working with the Indian seminaries, George D. Durrant, Wayne B. Lynn, and Douglas J. Larson began putting together a simple filmstrip entitled Tom Trails, designed to illustrate gospel principles.
The filmstrips soon became popular in all seminaries, not just the Indian program. Brother Durrant remembered attending a high school basketball game in where the band began to play the Tom Trails theme song.
As seminaries expanded internationally, the curriculum adapted. When Neal A. Christensen as Associate Commissioner of Church Education. The call came as a complete shock to Brother Christensen, who was serving as a mission president in Mexico City. The Christensens were immediately recalled from their mission, even though they had arrived only two months before.
Commissioner Neal A. Maxwell with Robert Stout, the seminary coordinator in Japan, about Over the next few years, dozens of American teachers traveled around the world on assignment to launch seminary and institute programs. One of the first seminary classes taught in the Philippines, about Courtesy of Steve Iba. The next few years brought a new series of adventures to the seminary and institute family—set against a global backdrop.
The teachers sent out to launch the programs worked tirelessly for the programs that were started, regardless of environmental challenges, long distances, and even political instability. In Brazil, David A. Christensen and his family of four slept on a single mattress, their only piece of furniture, for a month and a half until funds could be wired to solve the problem.
Iba paid his driver 20 extra pesos to drive through a flood in order to reach the pier where the materials for his teachers waited. When the car was swamped, Steve Iba, in his white shirt and tie, jumped out to push, while his wife, clutching a baby, stood on the seat of the car to escape the water rushing in. They were finally rescued by several Filipino boys, each of whom received 10 pesos for their trouble. This photo of Robert Arnold teaching a seminary class in Guatemala appeared in the Church News on January 15, page 8.
In Guatemala, Robert B. Arnold, a CES coordinator, was accosted by government soldiers because of duplication equipment found in his house. The soldiers assumed the equipment was being used to print antigovernment propaganda until Bob Arnold explained he was a Mormon setting up an educational program.
Brimhall sat on the roof of his house with his children as they watched jets bomb the presidential palace during the coup to overthrow the Marxist government. Even more amazing than the stories of the American teachers were those of the native teachers who were recruited to take over the program. Joe J. And what a work they did. Amado, was selected to lead the system.
He later went on to serve as a bishop, stake president, and mission president. He eventually became the first stake president in Korea, later serving as a mission president. The progress of the program was so rapid that Joe J. Zone administrators, about Back row: Frank M.
Bradshaw, Frank D. Day, and Dan J. Front row: Bruce M. Lake and Alton L. Courtesy of Alton Wade. As seminaries and institutes began to influence the global Church, the international Church also profoundly changed seminaries and institutes. Teachers and administrators began to take a wider perspective on the work, and a new spirit of unity emerged that transcended national boundaries.
No better example of this phenomenon exists than with Franklin D. Before joining Church education, Brother Day served in the U. Frank Day was chosen as the zone administrator over Asia.
As he traveled to Okinawa, the site of one of the bloodiest battles he fought in, he found himself filled with dread, wondering how he could overcome the hatred ingrained in him from his experiences in the war.
He remembered nervously walking off the plane and seeing Kan Watanabe for the first time; he was the mission president there to pick up Brother Day. They embraced. During his work in the Orient, Brother Day saw the same kind of miracles happen in the hearts of all the men involved in the program.
At one area convention he saw two teachers, one from Korea and the other from Japan, embracing each other in farewell and thanking each other. In the United States, momentous changes came to the educational system during this period. One of Joe J. The Book of Mormon had been taught sporadically in classrooms for years and as a part of most ninth grade courses since , but in Brother Christensen submitted a proposal to make the course a requirement for seminary graduation.
The measure met with overwhelming approval. President Spencer W. In Stanley A. Peterson was appointed as Associate Commissioner of Religious Education. The curriculum is organized in a sequential or chapter by chapter manner. Instruction concentrates on a different volume of scripture each year, rotating between the following four courses: Old Testament , New Testament , Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants and Church History.
By the time a student graduates from seminary, he or she will have completed the study of all of the standard works of scripture. Students with disabilities may be assisted with alternative format materials and, in some locations, adapted needs classes. The program has since grown into a worldwide system of religious education, bringing gospel instruction to young members of the Church throughout the world.
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