How to Prepare a Come Follow Me Lesson in 5 Minutes with AI

Somewhere between the calendar reminder and Sunday morning, most of us have had the same thought: I know what chapters we're on, I just don't know what to do with them yet. That gap between reading the assignment and having an actual lesson is where most of our prep time disappears. This is a walkthrough of how ComeFollowMe.io closes that gap, and an honest answer to the question a lot of teachers ask before they'll even try it: is using AI for this cheating?

What You're Actually Doing

The generator asks you four or five questions, and none of them are complicated.

Pick your week or your talk. You can choose the current Come Follow Me block, like this week's Fall of Israel and Judah reading in 2 Kings, or search ahead to something like Kings Who Trusted the Lord. If you teach Elders Quorum or Relief Society, you can pick a general conference talk instead, since those classes are studying talks directly now.

Pick your calling. This is the part that actually changes the lesson, not just the label on top of it. A Primary lesson for Sunbeam through Valiant gets simplified language, a song suggestion, and a hands-on activity. A Sunday School class gets cross-references and a discussion framework built for adults or for youth, depending on which you choose. Elders Quorum and Relief Society get a discussion-heavy plan pulled from conference talks. There's also a track for Gospel Principles, which is written for new and returning members, and one for Family Home Evening, which assumes you've got a four-year-old and a fourteen-year-old in the same room.

Set your duration and style. Maybe you've got the new 25-minute Sunday School slot, maybe you've got a full 50 minutes with Elders Quorum, maybe it's a 20-minute FHE. You tell it how long you actually have, and it paces the lesson to fit instead of handing you forty minutes of material for a twenty-minute class. You can also nudge the style toward more activity-based, more discussion-heavy, or a balance of both.

Add an emphasis if you want one. If your class just went through something hard, or you already know the one verse you want to build around, you can tell it that and it'll build the lesson toward that emphasis instead of guessing.

That's it. Four or five choices, and the plan generates in under a minute. The name of the game is getting you from a blank page to something workable fast, which is really what "five minutes" means here. It's not that teaching takes five minutes. It's that starting no longer has to eat your whole evening.

What You Get

The output isn't a paragraph of vague suggestions. It's a structured lesson plan with:

• Timed sections, so a 25-minute lesson is actually broken into chunks that add up to 25 minutes, not just a list of ideas
• Five to eight discussion questions that are specific to the week's block, not generic "how does this make you feel" filler
• Printable activity cards for classes that need something hands-on
• A take-home challenge, so the lesson doesn't just end when class does
• Conference quote integration where it's relevant, pulling from real conference addresses
• Direct Gospel Library links so you can go read the source material yourself, which you should always do anyway

Premium plans also get audio overviews, so you can listen to the lesson summary on the drive to church, which has saved me more than once on a morning that got away from me.

What AI Is Actually Good At Here

Structure, timing, and a first draft of discussion questions are things a language model is genuinely good at. It has read a lot of lesson manuals and a lot of discussion frameworks, and it's fast at assembling those into something organized around this week's specific verses. It's also good at pacing. If you tell it 20 minutes, it won't give you a lesson that only works in 35, which is a mistake most of us have made at least once with a lesson we wrote ourselves.

It's also decent at variety. If you've taught the same class for two years, you've probably noticed your own lessons start to rhyme. An AI-generated starting point can nudge you toward an angle on the text you hadn't tried, which is worth something even if you end up changing half of it.

What Stays Yours

Here's the part that doesn't change, and honestly shouldn't. The generator doesn't know your class. It doesn't know that Brother Peterson lost his job last month, or that two of your Beehives are struggling with a friendship that fell apart, or that the Sunbeams have a new kid who's shy and needs to be brought in gently rather than called on directly. It doesn't know what your ward has been quietly carrying this year. You do.

It also can't bear testimony. It can write a lesson that points toward Christ, because that's what the curriculum is for and what the material calls for, but the moment where you tell your class what you actually believe, in your own words, is not something a tool can hand you. That has to come from you, in the room, in real time.

So the honest way to think about it is that the generator does the scaffolding and you do the building. It hands you a structure, some questions, and a place to start, and you decide what stays, what gets cut, and what gets said that isn't written down anywhere.

Is This Cheating?

I get why the question comes up. There's something that feels a little uncomfortable about typing a scripture reference into a computer and getting a lesson plan back, especially for something as personal as teaching the gospel.

But think about what we already accept without blinking. Nobody thinks it's cheating to use a lesson manual, or to borrow an idea from a talk you heard, or to search the Gospel Library for a topic and read three different resources before class. Preparation has never meant staring at a blank page until inspiration strikes. It has always meant gathering good material and then shaping it into something that fits your class.

An AI lesson generator is a prep tool, the same category as a manual or a study guide, just faster and more tailored to your specific class and your specific time slot. It doesn't teach the lesson. It doesn't stand up in front of your Primary class or your Elders Quorum and talk. You do that. The tool gets you to a solid starting point quickly so you have more time left over to actually think about your class, pray about what they need, and figure out what you want to say, instead of spending that time hunting for discussion questions or trying to guess how long an activity will take.

If anything, I've found it does the opposite of cheating me out of preparation. It gives back the twenty minutes I used to spend just getting organized, so I can spend them on the part that actually matters.

Try It for This Week's Lesson

If you want to see it for yourself, the fastest way is to just run this week's block through it. Pick your calling, set your time, and see what comes back. You can edit anything, skip anything, and add whatever your class specifically needs. Generate a lesson now and see how much of the drafting it can take off your plate.

And if you're teaching a class that's now studying conference talks every week instead of a scripture block, you might also want to read how to teach a 25-minute Sunday School lesson, since the shorter format changes more than just the clock.

Either way, the tool is there to get you to Sunday morning with a plan in hand instead of a blank page and a prayer that inspiration shows up on time. The lesson is still yours. This just gets you to the starting line faster.

ComeFollowMe.io is an independent teaching resource and is not affiliated with or endorsed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.