Faculty Inservice Thursday, 9/11

Dear Faculty,
Thank you all so very, very much for all you do! I am so grateful to each of you for all your efforts "To help the young adults understand and rely on the teachings and Atonement of Jesus Christ, qualify for the blessings of the temple, and prepare themselves, their families and others for eternal life with their Father in Heaven." Thank you for that, and please do not forget, that is our Objective, nothing else.

You will remember we have four priorities this year. In this upcoming inservice we will touch on a portion of each of them.

Strengthen Unity & Elevate Learning. In our faculty inservice on Thursday morning (6:00AM-7:00AM at Jamboree), we will seek to "harmonize our efforts with...the direction of those appointed to lead us" by covering the Administrator of S&I, Brother Chad Webb's talk from the August S&I Training. The talk is titled, "An Invitation to Study the Doctrine & Covenants." Come ready to discuss how his invitations can be applied in your class, even, no, especially if you're not teaching the Doctrine & Covenants. 

Seek Truth. We will also discuss several resources to "help [our] students be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ and discern truth from error." There are several resources listed on a bookmark I made for you to share with our students for finding answers to our questions about the gospel and the Church, I will share these with you in our inservice. There are six resources we will discuss and you will want to continue to review or familiarize yourselves with them prior to the meeting:

• The Standard Works should be our first line for answering students questions;
• The words of the living prophets and apostles;
• The Seek Truth website at www.si.lds.org;
• Fair Mormon found at www.fairmormon.org;
• Gospel Topics on www.lds.org;
• And finally, we ought to always encourage our students to bring their questions to institute! We may not know all the answers to all the questions we might hear, but can and ought to help our students learn for themselves. Are there other sources I am missing? Lets look at those too. 

Reach One More. We will discuss different ways we can simply "counsel with priesthood leaders to increase enrollment, attendance, and completion....[And] act on the direction received." Yup, I mean it, simple. Simple, such as asking your own home ward Bishop something like, "Who do you think I could invite to my institute class this week?" or "Sister Relief Society President, which of the 18-30 year old sisters in Relief Society could be blessed by my inviting them to come to my institute class?" Lets start simple, with our own ward families and then we will worry about reaching out from there.

Do you think we can do all that in one hour? I do. We will need to focus our efforts, exercise faith in the Lord, listen to the promptings of the Spirit, and get to work. 

Brothers and Sisters, we have souls to save and a great work to do. Are you ready? I know you are, President Monson says, "Whom the Lord calls, He qualifies." Trust in that, trust in the Lord, He is on our side. Let no spirit of digression get in our way. The Lord will bless us, He will bless us, I know He will.