We Learn to Teach "By Study and Also By Faith"

I wrote yesterday that the time to prepare to serve a mission is not the day you enter the Missionary Training Center.  I think this is more significant for those who are not learning a foreign language because their time in the MTC has been shortened from three weeks to two.  But even those learning a language, most of their time in the MTC will be spent on that effort.

I had the opportunity to attend a missionary prep program in my stake during the eight months preceding my mission.  At two meetings a week we were taught by returned missionaries, and once a week we could teach mock discussions.  I had many opportunities to teach the first discussion, and a few other opportunities to teach the second.  As I recall, we covered the first two discussions in the MTC.

During my first two months in the mission field I had to pass off each of the six discussions to my district leader, meaning I taught him in mock discussions each of the six.  Outside of making some visual aids for the plan of salvation portion of the fourth discussion in missionary prep, I learned the third through six discussions primarily during those first two months.

Having mastered the first two discussions before my mission, learning the remaining discussions did not prove to be very difficult.  Having taught mock discussions to members, teaching my district leaders was easy.  Teaching a real investigator for the first time was almost as easy.  The most difficult aspects of my time in the MTC and my first few months in the mission field turned out to be dealing with difficult companions, overcoming a lack of certain social skills, and dealing with an extremely slow area.

The discussions from my era were relatively easy, certainly compared to what missionary are asked to do now.  There was a time when the discussions were tightly scripted, the missionaries had to read the presentation word for word, and they were even directed at certain points to "look up and smile."  New discussions were introduced by the time I was preparing to serve that allowed the missionaries a significant amount of flexibility.  As long as we covered the principles of the discussion we could put them in our own words and even expand on them, within reason.  Of course, we could also just repeat the principles word for word if we chose (a pretty good portrayal of the first discussion in my era can be found in the move The Best Two Years).  It's a whole new ball game for today's missionaries.


Looking through Preach My Gospel one soon realizes that missionaries today are being asked to study certain principles and then make lesson plans to teach them.  The book gives overviews of principles to be taught, and then leaves the missionaries to plan how they will teach them.  However, the missionaries are not completely left on their own as a few example plans are provided.  There does not appear to be an option of just repeating principles word for word.  Another way of putting it is that missionaries today are not so much learning discussions as studying and learning the gospel and figuring out how they will teach it.

Hopefully you have been paying attention and doing the daily scriptural reading during those four years of seminary.  If not, now is the time to get serious and really read, study, pray and ponder.  For scripture study I would start with the Book of Mormon, then add the New Testament as familiarity with those texts will be the most helpful.  Read and study Preach My Gospel and the Missionary Preparation Student Manual, and find someone to teach at least the first two lessons to in mock discussions -- that, of course, would require some attempt at lesson planning.

I've never had to make a lesson plan, but I have prepared several talks for church meetings and there are some similarities to lesson planning and preparing a talk.  About a year ago I was asked to speak in Sacrament Meeting on Easter Sunday, and I only had a week to prepare. I started the week with prayer and scripture study and then later started writing my talk, giving me a couple of days to practice and revise. I thought about what principles I might discuss, some personal experiences, and looked for some quotes I might use.

Lesson planning, like preparing a talk, is a way of organizing our thoughts and information in a clear and brief manner -- brevity is a virtue in public speaking, less often really is more.  Begin with a single idea or topic and finding supporting information.  An organized lesson plan can help us in identifying principles that we may have overlooked.  A lesson plan can be as simple as writing a topic and listing under it a few related items, or it can be more complex as a collection of related information divided into several subcategories.  Another way to develop a lesson plan is to start with some general questions to answer or categories of information to look for whenever we study a doctrine.

Before you can teach God's word, you must first learn His word.  We learn to teach "by study and also by faith" (D&C 88:118).