EQ & Relief Society: How to Build a Great Discussion from a Conference Talk

If you teach Elders Quorum or Relief Society, your second hour looks different than it used to. Sunday School studies the week's Come Follow Me block. Your class studies a talk from the most recent general conference. Every week, a different talk. That is a new lesson every single Sunday, and it is a different kind of preparation than picking apart a chapter of Genesis.

I have taught both, and I think the shift catches people off guard. With scripture, you already know the text is inspired and you are just deciding which verses to sit in. With a conference talk, you are working with a spoken address, usually eight to fifteen minutes long, that was written for a much bigger audience than your class of twelve people in metal folding chairs. Your job is to find what that talk is actually saying to the people in your room, not to summarize the whole thing.

The Rhythm Is Different Now

The old Sunday School model was built around a shared text everyone had read, or at least could look up together. The talk-based model assumes something different: most of your class did not read the talk this week. Some watched conference back in April or October. Some did not. A few might not remember which talk you are even referring to until you read a sentence out loud.

That changes how you open. I have had better luck starting with a short summary of the talk's core idea, in my own words, rather than assuming everyone is tracking with me. Two or three sentences. Then read the passage you actually want to discuss. Then ask your question. If you skip the summary and just dive into a quote, half the room is quietly trying to remember what talk this is instead of listening to you.

It also changes pacing. A conference talk usually makes one main argument with two or three supporting points and a story or two. You do not need to walk through the whole outline. Pick the point that matters most for your ward right now, and let the rest of the talk go unmentioned. That is not cutting corners. That is teaching.

Picking Your Passage, Not the Famous One

Every popular talk has a line that gets quoted everywhere, shared on social media, and repeated in three other lessons that same conference weekend. It is tempting to build your lesson around that line because it is easy to find and everyone already half-recognizes it.

I would push back on that instinct. The famous line is famous because it works for a general audience. Your class is not a general audience. It is fifteen or twenty specific people, and some of them are in a specific kind of pain this week: a marriage under strain, a teenager who stopped coming to church, a diagnosis nobody has said out loud yet, a testimony that is thinner than it used to be. The verse or sentence that will actually land in your room might be three paragraphs before the famous quote, in a part almost nobody remembers.

So when I prepare now, I read the whole talk once for the big idea, then read it again slower, looking specifically for the sentence that speaks to what my quorum or class is actually carrying. Sometimes that is the well-known line. More often it is something quieter. A speaker will spend one paragraph acknowledging that faith is hard right now, or that some in the room are barely hanging on, before moving into the more polished, quotable part of the talk. That paragraph is often where your class needs to be.

Teaching People in Survival Mode

Second-hour attendance skews toward people who are tired. Not lazy, tired. Shift workers who came straight from a night shift. Parents of young kids who have not slept through the night in months. Someone managing a chronic illness, or grief that is a year old and still heavy, or a calling that is quietly burning them out. If you build your whole lesson assuming everyone in the room has the bandwidth to reach for lofty doctrinal application, you will lose a good chunk of your class before you get through the opening prayer.

This does not mean lowering the bar on truth. It means choosing questions and applications that meet people where they actually are. Instead of "how can we more fully consecrate our lives to the Lord," try "what is one small thing this talk suggests we could do this week, even on a hard week." Instead of asking people to share a spiritual high point, ask what part of the talk felt hardest to live up to, and sit with that honestly for a minute before moving toward hope.

Elders Quorum and Relief Society both carry a lot of unspoken weight in the room. Part of your job as a teacher is giving people permission to be exactly where they are, rather than performing where they think they should be. A good conference talk usually already does this if you read closely. Prophets and apostles talk about their own weaknesses more than we give them credit for. Let that come through.

Discussion Mechanics Beyond the Circle

Going around the room and having each person answer the same question in turn is the easiest format to run and often the least effective one. By the fourth or fifth person, people stop listening to each other and start rehearsing what they are going to say when it is their turn. It also puts quieter members on the spot in a way that can feel more like an exam than a conversation.

A few things that work better in practice:

Ask, then wait. After a real question, count to five in your head before saying anything else. Silence feels long to the teacher and normal to everyone else. If you fill it immediately, you train the class to wait you out instead of thinking.

Pairs before whole group. For a harder or more personal question, have people turn to the person next to them for sixty seconds before opening it to the room. This gets more voices actually engaged and makes the whole-group sharing that follows less exposed, since people have already tested their thought once.

Follow-up instead of moving on. When someone shares something honest, ask one more question before calling on the next person. "What made that hard?" or "What changed for you?" A single good follow-up question does more for the discussion than three new prompts.

Let disagreement stand. Not every comment needs a bow tied on it by the teacher. If two people share different takes on how to apply the talk, it is fine to let that sit without resolving it. Gospel application is not always one-size-fits-all, and the room usually knows that.

Close with something to do, not just something to remember. A conference talk lesson lands better with one specific, doable action for the week than with a tidy restatement of the talk's thesis. Something small enough that people can actually report back on it next month.

Where the App Fits In

This is the piece I actually built ComeFollowMe.io to help with, because the weekly talk-picking is the part that eats the most prep time. The app schedules conference talks automatically so your Elders Quorum or Relief Society lesson lines up with the talk your ward should be studying that week, and it builds a discussion-heavy lesson plan around it: a short summary to open with, five to eight real discussion questions, a few relevant quotes pulled from the talk itself, and a take-home challenge to close. You still choose which passage matters most for your room. The app just gets you to that decision faster instead of you re-reading the whole talk cold on Saturday night.

If you want to see how this pairs with the Old Testament block your ward is studying at home this year, week 29 covers the fall of Israel and Judah, and week 30 moves into the kings who trusted the Lord instead of leaning on their own strength, both of which sit naturally alongside a conference talk on faith under pressure. You can browse EQ and RS-specific lesson tools on the Elders Quorum and Relief Society calling page, and if your Sunday morning class needs something different, the Sunday School calling page covers that side of the second hour too. For more on how the shorter second hour changes lesson prep generally, see our post on teaching a 25-minute lesson.

The Point of All of It

None of this is about running a tighter meeting for its own sake. It is about giving fifteen or twenty tired, busy, imperfect people forty-five real minutes, once a week, to talk honestly about their lives in light of what an apostle said a few months ago. That is worth doing well. Pick the passage your room actually needs, not the one everyone already knows. Ask a question and let it breathe. Trust the class to do some of the work. Most weeks, that is enough.