The Vision

This year the Butterfield Canyon Stake will be providing a Mission Prep course at a stake level to not only prepare members of the stake for missionary service, but to bless anyone not planning on missionary service but want to improve their ability to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

The course material will come from the newly published “Missionary Preparation: A Teaching Resource” (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/missionary-preparation-teacher-manual-2025?lang=eng ). The guide at the beginning of the manual recommends that each learning activity have these parts:

1.     Study. Ideas to engage learners in study that encourages faith-inspired actions, such as reading, searching, highlighting, pondering, recording, discussing, and testifying. 

2.     Practice. Suggestions to help class members put what they have learned into practice. This usually involves summarizing, explaining, and teaching.

3.     Set a goal. Time dedicated for class members to assess what they have learned and what commitments they could make to learn, grow, and improve. You could invite learners to bring a personal study journal to record their goals throughout the course. (Rather than providing personal study journals and copies of PMG that are often lost or outdated, our stake has found it to be more effective to have a worksheet each week that includes pages from PMG and journaling opportunities. We will encourage participants to set goals each week, and remind them throughout the week via a class GroupMe.)

The Mission Prep teachers are expected to always begin on time (even if youth are late) and end on time(even if they are in the middle of saying something amazing). This is IMPORTANT to teach, by example, the concept of respecting other people’s time (missionaries are famous for being late to appointments, and teaching way longer than they schedule a lesson). We have found that teaching from 2:30-3:30 allows everyone to be done with Sabbath meetings, and still be home with their families for dinner (and participants that attend the 12-2pm block don’t even have to change!).