In light of Elizabeth St. Dunstan’s recent post lamenting the fact that we don’t hear enough women’s voices at church, imagine my surprise when I attended Priesthood meeting and the topic of the lesson was from Sister Jones recent General Conference talk, A Sin-Resistant Generation. The teacher even made sure to call her President Jones, rather than Sister Jones. I can’t say the lesson was particularly memorable–I generally don’t enjoy lessons that are repeats of General Conference talks, but I wondered how often the brethren (and sisters for that matter) have lessons based on General Conference talks on women? It’s certainly not common in my ward, and I doubt seriously that anyone in my ward is a reader of this blog.
Church Policy, Culture, Feminism, gender equity, General Conference, LDS, leadership, Mormon, Women
Women’s Talk in Priesthood Meeting
Sister Joy D. Jones, Primary General President
My bishop had also chosen President Jones’ talk for our Teachings of Our Times lesson today in Pr and RS. There are numerous subjects in that talk that were good for further discussion in the HP group. There is no need to handle that assignment as a repeat of a general conference talk. I didn’t do a book report; we had significant participation; and I made a point of repeatedly bringing the discussion back to something President Jones had said, though I’m not certain the HPs noticed I was doing that. I suspect my bishop’s choices among conference talks have more to do with subject matter than with who gave the talk in general conference. If so, gender doesn’t enter into the decision at the ward level.
Guy-
I’m so pleased to hear that your ward leadership chose to focus on her talk! Most of my wards have used 2 or 3 talks from women in the RS lesson every year, but not all of my wards used the same talk for priesthood and RS, so I have no idea what the statistics are from priesthood. My observations are anecdotal as it is, but it is encouraging to see individual wards sharing President Jones’ words.
My stake had the practice of going through every single conference talk in the Teachings for Our Times lessons, which I taught. This meant lumping together 3-4 (loosely related) talks into one impossibly disjointed lesson, but the sisters were represented. Once, all the ladies’ talks were lumped into one lesson for no apparent reason other than they were all women. Better than nothing, right?
I’ve been an instructor in our Elders Quorum for over 6 years now, almost exclusively assigned the 4th Sunday Teachings for our Times lessons. In our stake, the stake presidency and high council choose one talk for each month. For the past several years one of the talks by a female leader has been selected from almost every conference. Our May TfoT lesson was on President Jones’ talk.
That’s a good sign. I wonder whether this happens in my ward?