Lesson 1: Preparing for and Conducting Meetings

You may teach this lesson in its entirety or separate it into shorter segments. Adapt the lesson to your local circumstances and the needs, ages, and understanding of your quorum or class presidency.

The Lord Invites Us to Organize Ourselves

Read Doctrine and Covenants 88:119. Discuss how the Lord’s instruction to “organize yourselves” applies to quorum and class presidency meetings. What are some things we can do to organize our meetings?

Planning for Meetings Helps Us Organize the Lord’s Work

Help the quorum or class presidency fill out a sample agenda in preparation for their next presidency meeting. Consider discussing the following questions together:

Why is it important to consider questions like those on the sample agenda?
What other meetings or activities could we prepare for in this way?
How can we invite the Holy Ghost to help us as we plan and conduct meetings? (See Moroni 6:9; Doctrine and Covenants 46:2.)

You could also invite presidency members to prepare an agenda for the next quorum or class meeting that follows the outline provided in each lesson in Come, Follow Me—For Aaronic Priesthood Quorums and Young Women Classes. Invite them to think about items they discussed in their presidency meeting that also need to be discussed with quorum and class members. If time allows, you could invite them to practice conducting a meeting using an agenda they prepared.

Periodically, you may want to discuss how presidency members felt about a meeting. As part of this discussion, you could ask questions like the following:

Did the meeting accomplish what we intended?
What did we do to invite the Spirit into the meeting? (See Doctrine and Covenants 6:32.)
Did we try to include everyone?
How can we improve?

Supporting Resources

“Secrets to Conducting Effective Youth Presidency Meetings”
“Conduct Class Meetings to Help the Lord”
General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 10.4, 11.3.4, ChurchofJesusChrist.org
“So Great a Cause”
“Effective Aaronic Priesthood Presidency and Quorum Meetings”
“Aaronic Priesthood Quorum Presidency Meeting”