Does a youth leader ever feel like they have it figured out? This hasn't been my experience. However, I couldn't be an effective youth leader today without Dan Duckworth's presentation about going from youth worker to youth mentor. Mentorship is a key concept to understand when leading youth. In his presentation, Dan talks about ways to really turn the traditional approach to leading youth on its head. How can you better know your purpose? How can you find out their life goals? How can you build a relationship that is transformational rather than simply filling time during the weekly youth activity? You can watch Dan's presentation in the Young Saints virtual library by going to leading saints.org/14. You'll get free access for 14 days, and that will give you plenty of time to watch Dan's presentation a few times. Let's give youth the leadership they deserve. I got an email the other day from an individual, I forget where he is in the world, but he says, Kurt, I love Leading Saints and I listen to it every time I'm on the treadmill. And then one time during an interview, he heard that Leading Saints has a YouTube channel and, like, all the interviews, at least the vast majority of them are video recorded and you can watch the video recording of the podcast episodes. And I'm, like, yeah, man. Get on there. Go subscribe on YouTube to Leading Saints and you can get a visual of the interview and not just an audio experience. And even if you're not a big YouTube user, do us a favor because this actually helps us gain more reach and, expose our content to individuals who could really benefit from it, leaders around the world. So regardless if you are on YouTube a lot or not, go to YouTube and search for Leading Saints, find the familiar red logo, and just subscribe even if you don't plan to view every episode there. That's gonna help us, gain a larger audience and more reach, dial in the algorithm, and, we'll start showing up on leaders feeds that they didn't know how much they're missing here at Leading Saints. So head on over to YouTube, search for Leading Saints, and subscribe to our channel. And leave a comment every once in a while, but be nice. Alright. In this episode, I get to let my hair down and relax. I'm here with my friend, Dan, Dan Duckworth. Get to let his hair grow. That's right. I I lived down. So the board of directors leading Saints, you're really running the show by? Oh, yeah. I'm pulling all the puppet strings. You could just see your arms moving around. Boss. So but Dan and I, obviously, good friends, but we work together in our efforts of leading Saints here. You run a leadership organization for your day job, but we have the greatest conversations. We have the greatest podcast episodes that will never be heard. And so anytime I can just pull you in here and say, let's just chat about stuff. There's always something that comes out of it. So anything else you'd add to that, like, when people ask you, what is this Leading Saints you're a part of or or what is it you do? Well, I don't know. I mean, I just was at lunch with some folks and Leading Saints came up because this guy works helping nonprofits, and so I was kinda picking his brain a little bit. And, you know, they always wanna know what's it about. Right? And the lead off is always, well, we started as a podcast. Right? But if you could only see what we're gonna become. Yeah. And so he his ears kinda perked. And so, we got to talk a little bit about that, right? This idea of a mission to help bring Zion into the the local experience of the church, right? And so, I think that's kind of the exciting stuff that we get to talk about and work on as an organization is where is this headed? What is it that we're creating? Right? We've amassed a followership of 100 of 1000 of people, and how do we use that influence to further the work of the church? Yeah. And so and that's and, I mean, this is a conversation we have about Zion Building and things, and that might be framed in maybe a new way for the audience, but definitely the direction we're headed. How would you say, like, how is that attached to leadership? Why Leading Saints? Why not the Zion podcast or something? Like, why is that a leadership thing? Yeah. Yeah. Interestingly enough, these guys were a couple of marketers that I was with, and they instantly said, we love the name Leading Saints because it's so specific. It just, like, leans right in, like, clearly for Latter day Saints, clearly about leadership. And, you know, when you think about Zion, if you think about the definition of Zion being an exalted community, a unified community, right, gathering in Christ, this is a group of people who are of one heart and of one mind. That never happens without leadership. Mhmm. Zion is always the byproduct of transformational leadership. I shouldn't say the byproduct. It's the goal. It is the dream of all true leaders is to create a Zion community. And so those things are inseparable. They're two sides of the same coin. You can't have Zion unless you have transformational leadership because the current state is not Zion. Right? And without leadership, any Zion community would break down in entropy towards disorder and ultimately destruction and death. Yeah. And so leadership is the function of constantly either creating or constantly renewing the spirit of that community and the, you know, the the unity and the basis for their their identity. Yeah. I have to frame, like, like, leadership is simply like culture building, right, or establishing culture. Like, anything a leader does, you're contributing to a culture so that it's not up to you to do or you're not prodding people along. Just the nature of that community is is moving in that positive direction. And I think what's the most like religious word for culture? And I think Zion. Right? Like, that's what we're we're trying to to to establish a culture establish a culture in our faith community. And that's Zion. Right? And there's so much theology that confirms that. Yeah. Yeah. And you can see that every new leader who's called, they have this desire. Well, I shouldn't say every, but those who identify as leaders who get called into leadership positions, they immediately have this desire to create Zion. Right? How do we create this amazing extraordinary community together, whether it's an award council or award or branch or relief society or an elders quorum? Right? You were just called as an elders quorum president. Instantly, your heart and mind went to, how do we transform this thing into something amazing? Mhmm. That's I am. Yeah. And sometimes on a superficial level people when they hear culture that, you know, the phrase of, you know, oh, that's not doctrine, it's culture. And sometimes there's this feeling of we gotta get rid of the culture or or, you know, culture is bad. We just need to focus on doctrine when in reality, it's not about getting rid of the culture. It's about stimulating a really positive culture that then facilitates the doctor. Right? Yeah. And culture, as we talk about in our leadership programs, culture is a hidden force. It's the memory of a 1,000 moments. So more formally, culture is the imprint that the past makes on our choices in the present. So we remember the way things have done have been done. We remember the behaviors that get rewarded. We remember the behaviors that get punished. Right? And so over time, the goal of the community becomes survival. Mhmm. Individuals and the collective, it becomes survival. And so now the culture starts to reinforce the behaviors that keep us safe and comfortable and predictable. Right? When those behaviors no longer align with the ultimate goals and objectives of the organization, now culture is a problem because culture is keeping us entrenched in the status quo. But the work of leaders is to not only transcend that culture, but ultimately transform it so that you have a culture, you have a memory that now aligns with your highest objectives, your highest ideals. And when the culture begins to support that, it becomes a very positive force because people can step in, and they know immediately this is how we roll here. These are the behaviors that get us the results that we want. We've transcended the need to be comfortable or the need to be safe. Now we're focused on culture and behaviors that align with whatever it is our mission is about, whether it's, you know, bringing on the second coming of Jesus Christ or preparing for it, whether it's, you know, ministering to the sick and the and the afflicted. All of a sudden, the culture aligns with that, and that's when you get great results. Yeah. And in our faith tradition, I mean, we have a a strong tradition of, you know, we we wanna follow the brethren. We don't wanna get ahead of the brethren. We sort of wait for those cultural cues to come down from the general authorities of the general church and so we sort of wait for that, and we don't give ourselves permission to to simulate culture. We feel like, oh, that's not my that's not my role. My role is to make sure the doors are unlocked on Sunday, the lights get turned on, and we have someone to pass the sacrament. Right? And that's sometimes a very limiting place. So, I mean, what what comes to mind with getting people out of that? Or or sometimes it feels like, no. This is not okay. We gotta just wait for the general church to tell us what to do. No. This is a problem. Right? This is a problem. The the analogy that's been on my mind recently is Jacob chapter 5, where it's the allegory of the olive tree, and you got the lord of the vineyard who comes down and he gives instructions. Okay? So over the past 5 or 10 years, not so much in recent years, but the first few years of president Nelson's ministry and even for the 5 years before that, we were getting these directives from Salt Lake saying, we want you to change the way we do things. We want you to change the way we do ministering or Sunday school or the youth programs, sacramanities, whatever it is. Right? We want things to change. And then in the analogy of the vineyard, the laborers are supposed to go labor and to do the work of making change. But we've got this scenario, by and large. We've had some great examples where leaders took those new instructions, and they went and created, and they innovated, and they they did the kind of culture building work that you're talking about. But by and large, if you're paying attention and observing across the church, we've got the same behaviors and the same outcomes that we had before those changes were implemented. And to me, that's analogous to the lord of the vineyard came down, he gave instructions, and the laborers in the Vineyard, who are the leaders of the church, whether they're called or otherwise, sort of sat back and said, oh, okay. I guess this is the new way it's gonna be. These branches are just gonna graft themselves in over here, and that's gonna move you know, this is all just gonna happen because we got the word from on high. No. No. The the parable is, it came down and gave instructions, and it was the laborers who went and made those changes happen. Yeah. Yeah. And that's and that's the power of culture. Right? That just sucks us back into the status quo. And, because, you know, again, not that we're trying to be generally critical of the the programs things, but I mean, how different is a ministering look from home teaching, you know, or Sunday school class since come follow me? Like, the Sunday school feel different generally speaking or just the 2 hour churches that really shifted much. Some may say it's actually hurt the culture of a local ward because we're not engaging enough type of thing. So Let me tell you about this this analogy. So I was reading I was reading in, the come follow me curriculum. Right? So 3rd Nephi recently is what I was reading. And I come across this example that just hits me in the face where the people have been through traumatic experience with the the earthquakes, the storms, the the tempest, all those things. They're through 3 days of darkness. There's all kinds of weeping and howling going on, and then they hear the voice of Christ in the darkness, and it pierces through the darkness. And over the course of this entreaty where Christ is saying, I would gather you. I would gather you. I will gather you. Suddenly, their grief, which has been beyond human description, it turns into inexplicable joy. And what do they do next? K? This was really striking to me. They weren't given instructions. It wasn't Sunday morning at 9 AM. But what did they do next? They went to the temple to gather. Mhmm. And it says very specifically in the scripture, they gathered so that they could marvel and wonder and show each other the great changes that had been taking place. And as I read that read that, I saw it just hit me. That is the natural order of church. Mhmm. I don't mean the institution of church. I mean, the idea that those who are affected by Christ want to gather in Christ. Very naturally, we wanna find others and say, hey. You know, you can think about this in terms of the episodes in the New Testament. Like, people are saying, like, hey, Jesus healed me. Yeah. And they wanna go about, and Jesus is even saying, hold on. It's not time yet. Mhmm. Because the natural instinct is to say, who else is out there? If you don't know about this, I wanna tell you about the great changes. I wanna show. I wanna marvel. I wanna wonder. And if you've had this change happen with you, I wanna hear you Yeah. Marvel and wonder about these things. And so as I'm list or as I'm reading that, I'm taking that in. I'm also right now, I'm serving as a Stake Sunday school president. I've been doing that for about 18 months. And so I think a lot about the nature of teaching and what is what is the experience and the outcomes that we're creating in our Sunday school classes, but also in sacraman meetings and and other settings. And it just suddenly strikes me this huge contrast between what we experience in a typical church setting, typical Sunday school class, if you will, versus that spontaneous, fluid, dynamic exchange of witness of Jesus Christ. Right? So those who have experienced it can come and show and marvel to others, and those who haven't experienced it but desperately need it can bask in that light of, wow. If he did that for you Mhmm. What could he do for me? Right? Very, very different conception of the organized, orderly, scripted church experience that we've come to have on Sundays. And I bring that up because of that conversation we were just having where it's if you look at what the Brethren have been doing with the changes over the last 10 years, they've been opening up. Everything has been opening up, trying to give us more choice Mhmm. More flexibility with greater opportunity. What's the word? With greater Responsibility. Responsibility. Well Spider man. I'm trying to say no. The church. The in the scriptures, what does it say? There's more expectations. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Right? So as he gives us that, there's there's more on the leaders. Yeah. There's work to be done to say, okay. If we're supposed to have this more flexible, spirit driven approach to ministering, what does that actually look like? How do we create structures and patterns and expectations at our local level that actually reinforce that? Yeah. We didn't do that work by and large. Many units did, but by and large, we didn't do that work as leaders. And so now the culture is coming back in and saying, just make it look like home teaching. Mhmm. Right? In many areas. Not in every area, but in many areas. Just make it look like it used to look. We'll call it something different. Maybe say that ministering is even a plus home teaching, but it's not fundamentally something unique and different. Yeah. Same thing happened with Sunday school. Right? They came in and they said, we want a different style of teaching. We want a different classroom experience. That's a recognition by the Brethren that what was happening in Sunday school wasn't working on average. It wasn't accomplishing the goals and objectives that they had for that experience. Right? So they come in and they say, let's open it up. Let's allow for creativity and innovation. And we had a few people who stepped into that. But by and large, when we didn't know what to do with that space, the culture came in, and we said, okay. Let's just keep doing what we were always doing because we know it. It's predictable. It's safe. It's comfortable. Even if the outcomes aren't what we want or desire, at least we can kind of feel good about going through the process that we've seen for the last 30 years. Yeah. Yeah. And and going back to that, you know, the example of 3rd Nephi, what they gather, you know, they gathered around the the temple. I'm trying for some reason, it may feel a little too loosey goosey. Right? Like, we like our structure. It's like this is our time for doing we're doing this right now and somebody speaks now and then we do the sacrament. And so sometimes it's hard to really, you know, create that openness for ourselves as leaders, as local leaders saying, now let's like let's feel like let's fill this out a little bit. Let's see if people will grow into this because we surrender control. Right? That's the the scary part about it. So is there anything as far as on that local level, the applicable level, application level of, like, how do we gather those people? Or what does that look like in 2024? Well, I think it's interesting. Another example from 3rd DeFi that I actually just read this morning. So Jesus is still with the people and he's given them the sermon. So first of all, he starts by speaking to the leaders, calls the 12, speaks to the leaders. So he's got the leadership training meeting or counsel. I don't know what it is. Right? So then he turns to the general body, and he has sacrameting or something, or he's giving them instructions. He's giving them doctrines, and it's very much one to many communication. And this kinda goes back and forth a little bit. And then he says, okay, I have a script. The father gave me a script. He told me what to say, and I can't get through it all because you guys are too weak. So we're gonna take a break. Right? But that's really interesting because, first of all, he has a script. But second of all, he's willing to deviate from the commandments that the father in heaven has given him, the God of the universe. Right? He says, yeah, he gave me instructions, but I'm gonna deviate. And then chapter 17, third Nephi, he starts to deviate like crazy, and all of a sudden, you know, he's he's calling the lame and the lepers together. He's healing people. He's bringing the children. There's angels coming. Like, he's actually doing the thing that we say church is supposed to be, which is they're led by the spirit, you know, whether to preach or exhort or to, you know, all the different things. He's actually just living church right there. He's perceiving, and he's adapting to the needs of the people. Mhmm. Right? So he's got a script, but he's he's inherently flexible to that script. So this is this great paradox. Right? How do we do that in the church? We can get to the practicalities of it in a little bit. But from a principle perspective, when I talk about that being the natural order of church, right, spontaneous gathering, fluidly and dynamically interacting with each other about the changes taking place in our lives centered on Jesus Christ, right, being led by the spirit, whether we should do this or that, that's the natural order of church. When you start to institutionalize church and you start to say, okay, we're gonna meet once a week. Right? Not just spontaneously, but we're gonna set a day aside. We're gonna meet once a week. Now we're gonna do it at 9 AM. In fact, we used to do it for, like, 12 hours. I don't know how long they were meeting back in the day. Right? Uh-huh. But but, by the way, spontaneous church was a was Joseph Smith's way. Yeah. Right? My understanding from some of the stories is it would be Wednesday night at 6 PM, and all of a sudden, he'd pull up a a stump on the side of the street and start preaching, and everybody would the word would go out and hundreds of people would flock. Mhmm. Right? And that was church before we started to institutionalize it. So it isn't that institution is bad because it enables, like, oh, hey, let's just make sure we get together on a regular basis. Right? It's a system. Then systems are great. But when the system is in line with the goals and objectives, it's a great system. Yeah. When it falls out of line with the goals and objective, now it's the job of leaders to start to dismantle the systems and the processes and the structures that are now inhibiting the goals and objectives. And so it's paramount before you get to any discussion of the x's and o's, and I've grappled with this for 18 months, okay, with Sunday school because I sit in as many as 5 Sunday school classes on a Sunday observing. So I've got lots of data points, and and before my stake, I traveled my family for a year. So I was in a new sun this is when we had Sunday school every week. So I was in a new Sunday school class every week. Right? So quite a bit of data points. Right? And what I can say is that on average, the typical Sunday school class is broken. Right? And that may sound fairly alarmist just to say Sunday school is broken, but if you look at the objectives of Sunday school, doesn't match what we're creating. Mhmm. And what do you call something that doesn't accomplish what it was built to accomplish? Broke. Right? Called broken. Yeah. Right? So here we are. But before you can fix that, you have to go back and ask yourself, what is its purpose? Yeah. What is this thing supposed to accomplish? That's the starting point of all change. The best part about this is, again, sometimes it can feel like, oh, this is like it feels like, oh, you're trying to have people rebel or be renegades, you know, in the the culture, but it doesn't require you to be renegades. Again, we're we've been given so much flexibility and literally we've many of us been given priesthood keys. Right? The which keys allow you to drive something, to direct something. Right? And so we have the autonomy to do all this. It's not some renegade approach of, like, we're gonna build blow up the whole system and start from scratch. Right? And I think in our conversations, and we can go into this a little bit as far as things we've done both in in my elders quorum, yours in the the Steak Sunday School that sort of allow some of these things to to get some traction. Right? This is that the next direction you wanna go or what? I mean, I think you need to look no further than the Book of Mormon because the Book of Mormon repeat and even no no further than Jesus. Right? Mhmm. These are examples of of people who came and said the systems, the processes, the culture are no longer aligned with the objectives. Mhmm. Right? Whether it's Alma talking about breaking down the traditions of our fathers. That is, like, ancient scripture language for culture, the traditions of our fathers. And, hey, when those traditions align with our objectives, we love those traditions. They work. When those traditions no longer get us the results we're trying to get, we gotta do away with them. We gotta replace them. That's what leaders do. Right? And Jesus the same thing that I'm pulling over here because there's a picture of Jesus on the wall. The thing that Jesus did when he came, and he said, look. We're doing away with the old, and we're bringing in the new. And that can feel to local leaders, they can feel like, oh, that's not safe space because that's up to the brethren to do that. But go back to that analogy of Jacob 5 in the allegory. The brethren, the lord through the brethren, have come down and said, you are instructed to transform the way Sunday school and ministering and the youth program works. That is now your labor. Your labor is to figure out how to transform them in line with these principles. And, by the way, we could go through and, of course, my mind's on Sunday school, but we could go through teaching in the savior's way, and I could talk to you about how these are principles of transformational teaching that we pay lip service to. Right? Mhmm. We put lipstick lipstick on a pig or we whitewash the tombs, as Jesus would say, but we are not actually changing the way that we do Sunday school. Right? So the the the effectiveness of a Sunday school class is wholly dependent upon the individual gifts and talents of the teacher Mhmm. At this point. Because our culture is so strong, anybody can be called in, and they will do something very similar. Now they might have different techniques, and I watch them, and they do different things. And some people will bring in object lessons, and other people will bring in a PowerPoint presentation, and other people will rifle through the pages of the scriptures. Right? But, ultimately, they're all doing the same thing, which is knowledge transfer. That's the old way. That's the traditions of our fathers. We're trying to get you to know something in your head, where the teaching of Savior's Way and the come follow me are very clearly trying to promote what we might call transformational teaching, which isn't about what you know. This is Elder Oaks. Right? He said, unlike the institutions of the world, unlike other forms of preaching, the gospel of Jesus Christ isn't trying to get you to know something. It's trying to get you to become Right. Something. And that's the kind of teaching that come follow me in teaching the Savior's way is begging for us to step into. We just don't know how to do it. Right. And this is the part where naturally people are listening to this thing. Alright, Dan. Like, so what are the 5 steps? Like, how do we do this? Or what is the reinvented new Sunday school or whatever look like? Just tell us what it looks like and we'll go do it. Right? And this is at the core of what we do at Leading Saints. It's like we never try and present like the way to do everything. We give you a selection like this what this guy is doing. So this lady's doing this is, you know, and it's, oh, maybe pick and choose and but were you feeling guided? Right? And so that that's the beauty of it is that the your steak Sunday school doesn't have to look like the steak Sunday school down the street because there may be different purposes, different revelation, different directions that you wanna take those groups. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. And laboring in the vineyard. Right? Like, there was different quarters in the vineyard, different things going on. Maybe different laborers were doing different things in different parts of the vineyard, all acting on the same instructions. Mhmm. Right? And so, you know, if we look at what our stake has been trying to do, I'll tell you that I've spent the first 12 to 15 months just observing. Mhmm. And I walked in, and I said, okay. So this is a unique calling for me because as a as a professional, I do a lot of teaching. I'm not a trained teacher, but as a leadership development professional, my goal is transformation. My goal is character change. It isn't to get people to know something about leadership. I don't teach people, here's your 10 step model of what a great leader looks like. Yeah. Right? I walk in and say, I can't actually teach you about leadership, but I can create the conditions in which you are more likely to develop yourself as a leader. And then what you become and how you grow is actually called multifinality. There's any number of paths that you could take in any number of destinations you could end up in. But my goal is just to get you out of the status quo. Mhmm. Right? That's a very similar approach when you think about teaching for becoming. Right? Character change, spiritual development. It's not teaching for knowledge transfer. And so I have been grappling with that for the last 18 months is how do you do that at a stake level? How do you, you know, you can't walk in and just say, like, here's what teaching should look like. Let me tell you what I mean, I've sat in those. Right? Mhmm. I sat maybe 12 years ago when the Stake Sunday School presidency came in, and they were gonna show us what great teaching looked like. And he proceeded to violate half of the principles that he was teaching us. Mhmm. Right? And so you kinda walked away, and you're like, I'm not really sure what that was, but it wasn't inspirational, whatever it was. Right? So one of the things that I've repeatedly been thinking about is a lot of times in the those of us in the church who are called as teachers, we don't have any clue what transformational teaching even looks like. It's outside of our experience. So we can't even, like, categorize it when we hear it. Right? At best, we might think of, like, oh, yeah. Like, Socratic teaching methods. Well, Socratic teaching methods could be used for knowledge transfer. Or we might think, like, oh, maybe it's role playing or experiential learning. Well, those are also used to reinforce knowledge transfer. So there's a lot of different techniques we associate with it, but what it really comes down to is the instructional intent. And so what I'm trying to work on with some teachers in our stake right now is, what is your intent? Like, when you walk into the classroom, fundamentally, what's your objective? If it is to get them to know something, you've just restricted yourself Mhmm. To this domain. But if you can flip that belief even experimentally to, what would it look like if I were to try to get them to become something or rather to help them, empower them to become something? Like, what would I do differently? This is where I go back to the idea of that restoring the natural order. Right? What do we need to kind of remove from the experience that we typically have on a Sunday that reinforces classroom didactic style learning. And what can we do? Like, honestly, Jesus very rarely taught in the synagogues, and when when he went in, it was usually to kinda blow things up. Right? Like, you know, drop a few bombs on people. Most of his teaching was on the hillside or in the plains or on the sea shore. Walk to the next city. On the walk to the next city. Right? What if that was church? Right? What if church was out walking and talking? You think it's impossible? We do it. In my Sunday school class, the weather's permitting, I say, okay. Here's an exercise we're gonna do. We're gonna walk around the church building 3 or 4 times. We don't even have grounds. We had got a building in a parking lot. That's all we got. So it's like, we're gonna walk in this rectangle a few times while we have this conversation. Right? But that aside, even if it's inside a classroom, now you're starting to ask yourself questions like, how do I remove the cultural cues that make you think you're here to learn this way? Right? Mhmm. Well, first of all, if we're all facing in rows, facing one person, we're socially conditioned to just sit there and listen to what that person is gonna say to us. So maybe I need to put a a circle of chairs. Right? Well, how many people are too many people to have a circle of chairs? We've done it with 30. I've seen it done it with 60. Right? It's not the only thing that can be done. I've also seen rooms, with 60 kids in it. That was a transformational setting, but they were in rows because frankly, the room was tiny, and that room was shoulder to shoulder packed. Yeah. Right? But there was transformational teaching happening. So start with the environmental cues. Right? That's one of the things. But it's always coming back to what is your intent. Yeah. And that's I've heard it framed that a lot of times people are in a beta state where they're like they're just like passive listening. And then you do something so so nuanced, so natural, just sort of get them in the alpha state where they're like, oh, no. Like, I'm engaged here. I have to do something. Right? And where that's, you know, taking the walk around the building or how you arrange the chairs or just taking them in a different room. And this is it's difficult at times I admit because we're given these buildings, and that's where church is gonna happen for that next 2 hours. Right? And so we have sometimes get creative or split it up or have multiple teachers or whatever it is. But I think the principle there is, like, how can you disrupt that beta state getting them into a different state of mind, then you can work with them. Right? If we're we just rely on, like, oh, I'll I'll just have some more poignant questions. That's what I'll do. And then they kinda just blink at you the same like they did before. Right? And so there's an infinite ways to do that. But if you say, I'm gonna ask you this poignant question, then I'm gonna give you 60 seconds to think in silence about it. Yeah. And then everyone in this room is gonna have a chance to vocalize what they're thinking. All of a sudden, they're like, oh, I'm gonna be part of this. Yeah. Right? And so now they engage in a different way. Yeah. And there's a 1,000 techniques we could talk about, and I'm by no means an expert on all the techniques Right. Of how to facilitate great learning. But what I think is important in what you just talked about was experimentation. Yes. Right? Yes. So we just had general conference. Elder Kieran spoke about the Church of Joy, and it was a very moving, descriptive talk about what church looks like. The only problem is is that's not what most church experiences look like. They don't look joyful. Right? And so you can kind of go one of 2 ways where you start to get into behavioral engineering and you say, like, we're gonna make church look joyful, which then becomes inauthentic. Right? Or you can start as a leader to say, are my people smiling? Are my people engaged as a teacher? Right? Am I noticing how they're interacting with this experience? And am I willing to deviate from the script to experiment? And maybe it's not just the script I came in with, but it's the cultural script. I'm willing to do something positively deviant to shatter the norms and try something new to bring them into this experience. This is Jesus with the people in 3rd Nephi saying, I perceive that you are weak. Something needs to change. I'm leaving. Mhmm. Guess what? He didn't perceive it right. That's not what they needed. They needed him to stay. And after a little while, he goes, actually, I perceive that you want me to do the miracles that I did for your brother in Jerusalem. Okay. Let's stay and do that. Right? So he's experimenting, and then he says, now bring me your children. But then all of a sudden, he's like, wait a minute. Actually, I think we need to pray right now. So he kind of, like, stops with the children, and he prays, and no man can speak the great things that were spoken by Jesus at that time and the joy which filled our hearts. Then he comes back to the children. Right? So there's this dynamic, like, give and take with the people Mhmm. This ability to read their emotional states. Right? We just held a gathering in my home where we're kind of introducing some concepts of transformational teaching to people in the state who wanted to come and learn about it. And the whole focus of our conversation was on energy. As a teacher, you have to be managing the energy and the engagement of the people in the room. That's your responsibility. You can certainly walk away and say, oh, these people today, they're on their phones, and they're not listening to me, and they're talking with their neighbors, and the kids are doing whatever. Right? And it's all about this new generation, or it's all about this technology problem. But I walk into that room, and I go, this phone is a barometer of how engaged the people are are with my lesson. Yeah. I'm not gonna tell them to put them away. I'm not gonna put them in a basket because the second they turn those on, I now know what I'm doing isn't working. Mhmm. It's time to abort the script, and it's time to do something different. Yeah. Yeah. That's powerful. So as you're, like, leading in this the context of the Stake Sunday School, like, how do you get to them to know the purpose of the Sunday School and keep it in the forefront of their mind? Or Yeah. Well, we always wanna go back to the handbook. Right? And we think the answers are all there, and they are, but there's a lot of room for creativity within what the handbook gives us. So if you go to the handbook and you ask yourself it actually says, like, the purpose of Sunday school, the purpose of release site, the purpose of valor's quorum. Right? There's a header for each section, and all of them relate to the work of salvation and what's the wordings? It's salvation internal life or something like that. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. So they all have something to do with that. But then it's the second statement where it starts to get unique to each of them. With the Sunday school, it says, we do this by helping members to live and sorry. Helping members to learn and live the gospel of Jesus Christ. Okay. So we could stop right there and say, like, that's it. We know the purpose. It's to help people learn and to live the gospel. Well, what does that mean? Mhmm. What does it mean to learn and live the gospel of Jesus Christ? Well, now we're back into that conversation around, you know, what really is the purpose here? And if we don't have defined new vision, provocative disruptive vision of what those words mean, we will default to what we've always known and experienced. So we've all been in Sunday school for 30 or 50 years. We know what it means to learn and to live. Add on to that, we've all been in school for 18 or 20 years or however much time or 12 or 18 years, whatever it is. So we know what it means to learn. Right? And, fundamentally, it means to be talked at. It means to receive information. And so that's what it means to learn. And to live means go off on your own and try it out. Mhmm. Right? Well, there's another way to think about purpose other than just the stated purpose, and I love to do this exercise with everything that I'm engaged in, which is what is the discerned purpose? What is the self evident purpose? This goes back to some teachings of Aristotle who kinda started this whole conversation around purpose. And he said, to know the purpose of something, you don't have to ask its creator. You don't have to go to the handbook. You don't have to go ask the brethren, why do we have Sunday school? You just have to look at the unique characteristics of the thing because its purpose is self evident in its intrinsic nature. So we can step back and we can start to ask, well, what is unique about Sunday school or whatever it is you're leading at the time? What is unique about this that teaches me something about the purpose that I need to accomplish here and, therefore, what I need to change in terms of my beliefs and my approach? Well, with Sunday school, over the last 18 months, my mind has kind of settled on 3 primary characteristics. The first one is what is unique is the membership of Sunday school. What's unique about this is we are all members or affiliates of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. So we come with an interest in the restored gospel. That's an important characteristic. We don't all come with a desire to develop our intellectual understanding of esoteric doctrines or deep historical episodes or things like that. Right? What unites us all is that we all come with a spiritual need. That's a 100%. No matter who you're talking about, we come with the need either to understand and make sense of our lives through the gospel or to get help and guidance and support with our current situations that we're in. So that's, like, that's a fundamental characteristic. And now you take away the fact that there's no separate genders. It's mixed genders. Right? So there's some universal human experience that Sunday school should address, and it should do it through the lens of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In addition to that, we do have a separation in terms of age. Mhmm. We separate youth and adults, and sometimes we separate youth very minutely. I've spent a lot of time thinking about why do we do that, or rather, what is the purpose that's evident in the fact that we do that? And I think it comes down to this idea that spiritual development is intrinsically tied to our life experiences. And by age group, we are having very different life experiences. And even within a teenage category, those you know, a 12 year old's experience is very different than an 18 year old's experience. And then we have this problematic, you know, situation where, you know, we got early 20 somethings and we got, you know, 70 somethings in the same Sunday school class, and we can all kind of feel the incoherence of that because our life experiences are so disparate. But what unites us across that age spectrum is that we're all on a faith journey. Yeah. We all have spiritual needs, and we're all looking at some level, some more earnestly than others, but we're all looking to Jesus to help us meet those needs. Yeah. So the the first one was membership? Yeah. And then did you have to No. That's just the first one. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. 2nd one then. Many aspects of membership. Yeah. We're just rippling through them here. I got 18 months worth of stuff to download here. So what's number 2? So number 2 is a teacher. And this is critical because the teacher is a unique characteristic in a Sunday school class. These are unskilled, untrained, sometimes even unmotivated lay members of the congregation who are asked to come in and to teach. So by that fact right? Now, yeah, you you might have a seminary teacher who also gets called as your gospel doctrine teacher, and so it feels very different. But I've talked about the typical average experience. By the nature of that approach to staffing our Sunday school, we have just learned that the purpose cannot be about religious instruction. It cannot come from a position of expertise or authority because we are not putting experts and authority figures in the room. Mhmm. Right. Right? We are putting people who are at best peers. Maybe in the youth setting, they're a couple steps ahead on the journey, but they're still just peers on the journey of life. Mhmm. And that tells us a lot about what the nature of that gathering should be. Now you can juxtapose this. So if I juxtapose Sunday school to seminary, in seminary, the teacher is trained, is educated, hopefully highly skilled, and we should look for a different kind of instructional experience or educational experience in that setting. And I'll I'll give you an example. My daughter, who's currently at Southern Utah University, she is grappling with the fact that she's longing for a didactic experience. She wants to learn information and knowledge. That's the stage of life that she's in, but it's also the setting. And so when she shows up at seminary for 4 years or when she shows up at University Institute, she's expecting it's coherent to have something more of an informational flow. She wants to learn about histories and and multiple levels of doctrine and paradoxes and all of those things. Right? Yeah. That's an experience that she could have under a trained mentor. That's not an experience that you can replicate in Sunday schools. Therefore, we learn more about the purpose is through the the nature of the teacher is we're here as a group of peers to facilitate some kind of experience. Now go back to the membership. That experience is about our personal spiritual development. And, again, juxtapose at the membership level, Sunday school is different because every other body in the church, elders quorum, Relief Society, young women's classes, around priesthood classes, they have a community identity outside of the classroom. It is a group that you belong to. Mhmm. You belong to a relief society or an elders quorum. You don't belong to a Sunday school class. Sunday school class starts and ends. It is transient. It is temporary. Mhmm. And then it is over. And we learn something about the purpose of it, therefore. It is not community building. I would argue elders quorum, relief society, these have an inherent community building aspect to them. Time together in a room should be spent building that identity and preparing the group to go do the work that it has outside of that classroom. Sunday school, that doesn't exist. Yeah. So in Sunday school, we're focused on the individual. We enter as individuals. We exit as individuals. So our time together is as individuals. Now that's membership. That's the t shirt. The third one is the gathering. So even though we are individuals on individual journeys, there is some inherent reason why we get together. The communal nature of spiritual development cannot be overlooked. The people came to the temple. They needed each other to make sense of what was happening in their lives. Same reason why we come to Sunday school. Hey. I'm on an individual journey here, but I need you to help me make sense of my journey. And in fact, my journey makes a lot more sense when I help you make sense of your journey. And so that collective engagement is what a Sunday school class should look like. Right? And so now just in discussing the purpose of it, we start to see a very different experience emerging in our vision as opposed to the the what the seminary institutes used to call the sage on the stage. Mhmm. Right? You're no longer a sage on the stage. You're a guide on the side. And there should be this dynamic exchange of ideas and questions, and not ideas from the standpoint of, like because this this is the typical I'm gonna deviate for a second here. I'm gonna say, I have created a narrative of the typical Sunday school class in the adult Sunday school and the youth Sunday school after 18 months of observation. And in the youth Sunday school, the typical what you would see if you were to walk in there is you would typically see an overprepared, overstressed adult who is earnestly seeking to get this information into their heads. Yeah. And yet you see the kids who are totally disengaged, and they're expressing that through either, number 1, they're on their cell phones, number 2, they're chit chatting with their friends, or number 3, they're looking stone faced, bored. Right? That's them expressing, like, I'm not here with you. Right? That same disengagement is happening in the adult room, but it's happening it manifests itself differently. In that room, you see an overprepared, insecure teacher who's trying to prove her self worth to her peers, right, trying to feel validated in front of this very, like, you know, pressure situation, striving earnestly with good intentions. But the people in the room are if they are sharing, they're sharing their confirmation bias. Let me tell you how I see the world, and let me validate myself through this comment, through this discussion. That's very different than talking about my journey at an authentic level. I'm trying to explore and make sense of who I am at this point and how Jesus has helped me and how he will help me. That's a position of meekness as opposed to a position of expertise and authority. Most of the comments we get are expertise and authority bantering within a classroom. Let me tell you what I think. Well, this is what I think. Well, I once heard someone say this, so this is what I think. Mhmm. Right? That's knowledge transfer. It doesn't engage us in becoming. Right? Challenging our beliefs. Yeah. So take me to that as we wrap up here, like the application level of, like, the role of the teacher in all this. Like, how do we actually show up and do that and get out of our heads of being the nervous, anxious teacher? Yeah. I would challenge everyone here who's interested in this to, first of all, spend some time exploring these ideas of purpose and really through their own experiences, try to deconstruct some of the things I've said, but come up with their own Yeah. Right, their own vision and ideas. But if you start to visualize that kind of highly engaged Sunday school experience and, by the way, by engagement, I mean introspection and dialogue. So engagement could be quiet, but there's a difference between being bored and being introspective. Right? So introspective and then peer to peer dialogue. If you start to imagine that, then you say to yourself, well, what is the role naturally of the teacher given all these characteristics? Well, it's obvious the teacher's role is to facilitate engagement, which is introspection and dialogue. Now we could get into a 1,000 ideas about how you practically do that, but you just have to start there and say, that's my intent. That's my role and my intent. Now how am I going to experiment with showing up differently as a teacher? And it might take me a couple weeks or months or years to really gain some level of mastery over this. But like Jesus, I'm gonna be watching for their engagement, and I'm gonna be adjusting and adapting maybe from the script I wrote, or maybe I'm gonna come in with a script that is breaking the norms. And I know I'm gonna blow some things up, and people are gonna struggle with them. Mhmm. But I'm gonna do it because I'm trying to help this class get to a new level where we can really enrich the spiritual development of the people. So then I would challenge everybody to go back and read teaching the savior's way with that lens on and see if you don't find in there, not only the permission, not only the pleading for you to do something different, but also the principles that now, through that lens, will speak to you very differently. What does it mean to show up and invite diligent learning? What does it mean to create a safe space? Those are words that come from teaching in the savior's way. But when you think about them in the context of this purpose, now I'm thinking very differently about how I might need to show up. And that's the basis. Right? Because if I give you a list of 20 different ways you can do this, you won't really believe it. You haven't gone on a journey. You haven't changed. And so you'll show up and immediately revert to knowledge transfer. Right? You have to go on a journey as a teacher to become the kind of teacher who can teach for character development and spiritual transformation. The end. That's it for this Leading Saints episode. I encourage you to check out some of the most popular episodes of the podcast that we list at the bottom of the show notes. If you haven't listened to all of those, do so now. Remember, go listen to Dan Duckworth's presentation about youth mentorship by visiting leading saints.org/ 14. It came as a result of the position of leadership which was imposed upon us by the God of heaven who brought forth a restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And when the declaration was made concerning the own and only true and living church upon the face of the earth, We were immediately put in a position of loneliness, the loneliness of leadership from which we cannot shrink nor run away, and to which we must face up with boldness and courage and ability.