Teaching Gospel Principles: A Guide for Reaching New Members and Returning Friends

If you have ever taught a Gospel Principles class, you already know the room is not like other classrooms. On any given Sunday you might have a woman who joined the Church six months ago sitting next to a man who has been a member his whole life but stopped coming for a decade, next to a neighbor who is only there because a missionary invited her and she is still deciding if any of this is true. Three completely different starting points, one lesson, twenty-five minutes.

Most Sunday School material is written with a baseline of shared vocabulary and shared church history. Gospel Principles cannot assume that, and honestly, that is what makes it one of the harder callings to do well. You are not just teaching the week's Come Follow Me reading. You are teaching it to people who may be encountering some of these ideas, or some of this whole worldview, for the first time.

Here is what I have found actually helps.

Assume Nothing About What the Room Already Knows

The instinct in a lot of church classes is to reference things in shorthand. "As we know, the Plan of Salvation teaches us..." or "Like President Nelson said in conference..." Those references work fine in Elders Quorum. In Gospel Principles, they can quietly lose half the room.

It is worth going through your lesson before class and circling every piece of insider language: temple ordinances, endowment, ward, stake, calling, testimony meeting, even a phrase like "the Restoration." None of these need to disappear. They just need one sentence of plain explanation the first time they show up. "A calling is just a responsibility someone asks you to take on in the ward, our local congregation." That one sentence costs you five seconds and saves someone in the back row from spending the whole lesson feeling lost and too embarrassed to ask.

The same goes for scripture references. Do not assume everyone knows what Genesis is, let alone that "Moses" in Come Follow Me might mean either the biblical book of Exodus or the Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price. A quick "we're reading from the Old Testament book of Genesis, chapters 37 through 41" orients everyone in about two seconds.

Read the Scripture Aloud Yourself, Skip the Race

A pattern that works fine in a room of lifelong members but backfires in Gospel Principles is the verse-finding scramble, where you ask the class to flip to a reference and the fastest ones call it out while everyone else is still hunting through Leviticus by mistake. For someone holding a set of scriptures for the first time, or using an app they do not know how to navigate, that thirty seconds of fumbling is not neutral. It can feel like a quiet test they failed in front of the room.

I have had much better luck simply reading the passage aloud myself, or asking for a volunteer reader ahead of time so it does not put someone on the spot, and having everyone follow along on a handout or the screen rather than in their own scriptures. It sounds like a small change. It removes an entire category of unnecessary anxiety from the room, and it means the time you save goes toward the conversation instead of the search.

If you do want people using their own scriptures eventually, that is a great thing to build toward over weeks, not something to expect on day one.

Build in Safety Before You Ask for Reflection

A lot of Gospel Principles material leans on personal reflection questions, and those questions are genuinely valuable. "What has prayer meant in your life?" "Where have you felt God's love this week?" But reflection questions carry real risk in a mixed room. A returning member might be sitting with years of complicated feelings about the Church. An investigator might not have language yet for what they believe. A new convert might still be figuring out how their old life and their new faith fit together.

The fix is not to avoid reflection, it is to build safety around it. A few things that help:

• Offer the question to the whole room before calling on anyone, and make it genuinely fine to pass. Say the word "pass" is always an acceptable answer, out loud, so people know you mean it.
• Ask permission before following up on someone's answer. "Would you want to say more about that, or should we move on?" gives the person the wheel back.
• Give a written or think-time option before verbal sharing. Some of the most honest thinking in a room happens when people are not worried about how it will sound out loud.
• Share something a little vulnerable yourself first. If you model that the room is safe for an honest answer instead of a polished one, people follow.

None of this softens the doctrine. It just protects the people encountering it.

Anchor the Sweeping Old Testament Weeks With a Timeline

This year's Come Follow Me schedule is especially tricky for a mixed-experience class because the Old Testament moves through long stretches of history with a lot of names, a lot of kings, and a lot of jumping around. A week like Judges and Deliverers, covering Deborah, Gideon, and Samson across Judges 2 through 16, can be genuinely disorienting if you do not already have a mental map of where Israel is in its story. The same is true of a week like Courage in Babylon, which assumes some sense of how Israel ended up exiled in the first place.

For weeks like these, I have started opening with a thirty-second timeline instead of jumping straight into the text. Nothing fancy, just three or four words on the board in order: Exodus, then Judges, then Kings, then Exile. It takes almost no class time and it gives everyone, especially anyone new to the story, a peg to hang the details on. You can do the same thing on a smaller scale within a single story. The week on Joseph in Egypt has enough brothers, dreams, and reversals that a simple "sold into slavery, rises to power, forgives his family" outline on the board before you dig in keeps the discussion from getting lost in who is who.

The book of Esther is actually one of the friendlier weeks for a mixed room, since it reads more like a single connected story than a sweep through generations. It can be a good week to lean harder into discussion and lighter into scaffolding.

Keep the Doctrine Simple, Not Watered Down

There is a difference between simplifying and diluting, and it matters here. Gospel Principles exists because the Church recognizes that foundational doctrine deserves its own careful, patient teaching, not a shortcut version of what everyone else already knows. You are not teaching a lesser class. You are teaching the entry point.

That means it is fine, even good, to spend real time on ideas that a lifelong member might take for granted: what a prophet is and why we sustain one, what it means to have faith in Jesus Christ, why we believe scripture is the word of God. Slow down there. That is the actual job.

A Small Tool That Can Help

Building a Gospel Principles lesson every week, one that respects the readers already fluent in this and the ones just arriving, takes real preparation time, and that is exactly the kind of prep ComeFollowMe.io was built to help with. You can choose the Gospel Principles calling specifically, and it will generate a lesson using plain, welcoming language geared toward new and returning members, built from the week's Come Follow Me reading, with discussion questions, a simple structure, and printable activity ideas already sized for the calling. It will not replace the judgment you bring to the room, but it gives you a solid starting point instead of a blank page on Saturday night.

Whatever you use to prepare, the heart of this calling stays the same. You are often the first real conversation someone has about the restored gospel, or the first one back after a long time away. That is worth getting right, one patient, plain-spoken lesson at a time.