In October 2023 John Hilton III and I sat across a table with headphones over our ears and a red recording light on to do a bonus episode for the Y Religion podcast. After four years of hosting and producing the podcast, I was handing its reins over to John’s capable hands and introducing him to our growing audience. During the interview, John asked me about future plans for my time and what might be next on the horizon for Religious Education’s podcasts. I said:

With me not doing the week-by-week hosting and producing, . . . we’re going to do some limited series that we’re looking at. We want to do some things called Y Religion Presents and take a topic like “Y Religion presents excellent gospel teaching” or “Y Religion presents seeking by study and faith.” And they will be limited series . . . on a focused subject.

Less than two years later, in the summer of 2025, that’s exactly what we’ve done, releasing eleven episodes under the limited series header called Y Religion Presents: Gospel Teaching. Beginning on June 8 and concluding on August 17, 2025, a new episode was released each week on key aspects of excellent gospel teaching.

Figure 1

This Gospel Teaching series was proposed and developed by Church history and doctrine professor Casey Griffiths, a longtime member of the Y Religion podcast committee. Because some topics would require more than an hour-long episode, in 2023 Casey and I discussed launching some limited series on gospel subjects for Y Religion. Later, in September 2023, Casey sent me a formal proposal for a limited series on gospel teaching, part of which read as follows:

The Strengthening Religious Education document encourages scholarship in three areas: Academic, Gospel, and Pedagogical. . . . So far, the Y Religion podcast has done an excellent job highlighting research in the first two categories, but not the third area. We have some of the most well-trained and skilled religious educators on our faculty who could share their expertise in a way that would create an excellent resource for part-time, transfer, and adjunct faculty, and for gospel teachers in the Church in general. The limited series would highlight teaching methodology and provide a basic course in successful religious teaching for Latter-day Saints.

In October 2023 I pitched the general concept of Y Religion Presents and Casey’s proposal of an initial series titled Gospel Teaching to the Religious Education Administrative Council, which approved the plan. Through the fall of 2023, Casey and I collaborated on an outline of topics and presenters and the format of the episodes. How many episodes? Whom to interview? One expert per interview or two or more? If there are two or more guests, should we listen to all of guest 1 and then all of guest 2, or should we mix it up and go back and forth based on how they respond to the same question? What should be the main segments of each episode? Should we have the host offer an introduction and transition narration between segments, or just do a straight-up interview? We emailed and talked about each of these questions and more to determine the feel of the series.

Figure 2

We also discussed broadening the participants from beyond BYU faculty to include key teachers from other CES institutions, including Church leaders such as Elder Clark G. Gilbert (the CES Commissioner of Education) and Chad H Webb (the administrator of Seminaries and Institutes of Religion and First Counselor in the Sunday School General Presidency). Other General Officers who were interviewed included Bradley R. Wilcox (at the time serving in the Young Men General Presidency), Emily Belle Freeman (Young Women General President), Mark L. Pace (former Sunday School General President), and Susan Porter (Primary General President). Faculty from BYU Religious Education with training in education or specialties in the episode topics were also invited as guests, and during 2024 Casey Griffiths coordinated with and interviewed each participant.

Professor Griffiths and I decided on a format for each episode that included providing insights, strategies, and practical experiences for each topic, interviewing two experts per episode, and presenting insights from each expert in alternating fashion, with Casey as host providing introduction and transition commentary (see fig. 1). This format provided an engaging approach for the listener to hear expert insights, similarities, and differences on each question. Professor Griffiths spent many hours determining which clips should best be used to go together for each segment and recording episode intros and transitions. We hired BYU student James Call to do the postproduction editing for each episode. Other BYU student editors who assisted included Andrew Dawson, Zoe Moore, and Michael Van Tassell.

In all, eleven episodes ranging from organizing a lesson to active learning and creating relevance were produced (see fig. 2). In counsel with Religious Education administration, we decided that the best timeline for release of the series would be in conjunction with the CES Religious Educators Conference in June 2025. Adam Hellewell from the dean’s office created posters that were displayed for all CES conference attendees with information about the series and QR Codes for listening and subscribing (see fig. 3). Those who would later view the conference broadcast would see a pop-up advertisement for the podcast when they logged into the Church’s website, accompanied by a message from S&I administrator Chad Webb encouraging S&I teachers to listen to the series (see fig. 4).

The podcast had positive reception from its inception. Episode 1, titled “The Power of Teaching” and featuring Elder Clark Gilbert and Chad Webb, debuted in the top one hundred religion podcasts in America, coming in at number 56 during the week of its release. Through the summer of 2025, as each new episode was released, the podcast was downloaded an average of over fifteen hundred times per day.

If you as a reader have not listened to some or all the Y Religion Presents: Gospel Teaching episodes, I encourage you to do so. The principles that the series and guests share are designed to help all gospel teachers improve their abilities to teach the gospel powerfully and well, no matter the audience or age. Teaching is a gift, but also a skill that can and must be sought for and improved upon—by study as well as by faith. This series can assist you in the eternally significant task of gospel teaching.