As we heard the Lord’s servant usher in this newest revelation of change, we were encouraged and hopeful for several reasons. We have spent twenty-five years working together in exploring religion and family life through in-depth interviews with hundreds of highly religious families from many faiths. We have witnessed the many ways that healthy, home-centered religious life benefits individuals, families, and societies. Accordingly, we were excited for the ways this new home-centered initiative would magnify these blessings.

In this book, we provide edifying and inspiring examples from families of various faiths (including hundreds of families from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). However, we also share quotes from other religious scholars and leaders that reflect the counsel provided by living prophets and apostles. One nondenominational Christian father we interviewed at length said:

When as a family your hearts are pointed together toward the same thing, and it’s God, then parenting and economics and space and food and disagreements and hassles and joys and celebrations and all that other stuff . . . works different, it seems different, it feels different. . . . Our family are all oriented in the same way. Christ is King, He’s center, He’s what it’s all about. . . . Our faith informs our relationships and everything about us. [1]

In this volume we demonstrate how home-centered individual and family gospel study, discussion, and worship can “unleash the power of families,” bring “deep and lasting conversion,” and yield “joyful gospel living”—to borrow the focal phrases used by Church leaders in conference addresses about this subject.[2] We hope this book helps our fellow Saints, including young adults who are single or married, those who are parenting the rising generation, and those who are grandparents, to joyfully and effectively follow the inspired counsel from living prophets to move toward a home-centered approach to gospel learning and living. We suggest that a thoughtful, faithful, and joyful approach to home-centered religious life will facilitate more Latter-day Saints having meaningful revelatory experiences that will bring lasting conversion to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Who Are We?

We are two ordinary guys who are professors in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University (BYU). We each are blessed to be the husband of a wonderful woman and the father of terrific kids. Like most husbands and fathers, we have experienced the joys and challenges of marriage and family life. Like most believing Latter-day Saints, we have tried to live the gospel and teach gospel principles to our children, including engaging in practices such as daily couple and family prayer and scripture study and weekly home evening. And like most Latter-day Saint families, we have had our successes and failures with those practices as our families have grown up and adapted to various challenges. In other words, we are like most other active Latter-day Saint husbands and fathers—doing our best to work with our partners in striving to raise our children in love and righteousness but experiencing enough challenges to keep us awake.

In addition, we have been privileged to share an extraordinary experience together that relates closely to the recent invitations from our Church leaders. Several years ago, we discovered that in a roughly two-decade window of time, there had been nearly ten thousand social science studies published on divorce. We noted that during the same time frame, there had been only about three hundred published studies (only 3 percent as many) specifically addressing strong families and the characteristics that fostered their relational health. Since that time, it has been our aim to discover the secrets of “exemplary” families of faith.

Some Tools We Will Use

This book was inspired by several challenges from President Russell M. Nelson—challenges that have included seeking to “come, follow” the Savior, to “hear Him,” to become “exemplary Latter-day Saints,” and to “diligently work to remodel [our] home into a center of gospel learning.”[3] We use these challenges from President Nelson and other Apostles as the foundation of our message. As social scientists, we also seek to bring to the table the best of three additional data sets that we have spent months and years and even decades compiling—data sets that offer perspective on the vital concern of home-centered worship and family strengths. In summary, these helpful tools we will use include the following:

1. The Come, Follow Me report. This report that forms the “backbone” of this book includes surveys and comments from more than five hundred members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reporting challenges, successes, counsel, and insights regarding their efforts to respond to the Come, Follow Me invitation—including reports of blessings received.
2. The American Families of Faith national research project. This data set is based on in-depth interviews with nearly three hundred religiously, racially, and regionally diverse families (about seven hundred persons) discussing how religion influences their marriages, parenting, and families.[4] These families offer substantial insights into practices, processes, and products of home-centered family worship that are worthy of consideration by us as Latter-day Saints.
3. The COVID-19 and religious families study. In chapter 9, we also share some interesting findings from a survey of 1,510 Americans (including 250 Latter-day Saints) conducted in the summer of 2020 about how individuals and families responded to the COVID pandemic in the areas of spirituality, religion, family communication, and family meals.

Map of the Book

The first two chapters provide scriptural and doctrinal foundations for the rest of the book and share the major ideas we discuss throughout the remainder of the book. Chapter 1 presents scriptural and prophetic teachings about personal revelation, personal and interpersonal revelatory experiences, sharing revelatory experiences in a home and family setting, and prophetic teachings on the new home-centered approach to religious life in the restored gospel. In chapter 2 we focus on personal and shared spiritual experiences and how they can be facilitated by home-centered gospel living. In chapter 3 we discuss two prophetic teachings related to individual study and worship and provide ideas on how to connect with heaven through individual study and worship. Chapter 4 discusses how to strengthen faith and conversion through family gospel study. Chapter 5 provides ideas and encouragement regarding family study. Chapter 6 discusses ideas on joyful, home-centered family Sabbath observance with a focus on learning from our Jewish friends. Chapter 7 focuses on the ways that five hundred Latter-day Saints have felt President Nelson’s prophetic promises regarding home-centered gospel learning being fulfilled in their lives. In chapter 8, those same Saints share additional, unexpected blessings that have come from home-centered gospel learning. Chapter 9 provides some findings from research we did in 2020 about how 1,510 individuals (from couples and families) adjusted toward more home-centered religious life because of the shutdowns resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter 10 provides some final thoughts on sharing revelatory experiences in a home and family setting and discusses several important ways to do this that are positive and healthy. Chapter 11 focuses on two more themes that President Nelson has emphasized—participating in the gathering of Israel and following the covenant path—and how revelatory experiences can assist in these sacred activities.

Creating Opportunities for Revelatory Experiences (CORE)

In encouraging Latter-day Saints to think differently about their family gatherings, Elder David A. Bednar said, “If members of families, as they come together, would think in terms of ‘I’m preparing to participate in a revelatory experience with my family[,]’ . . . I think we would prepare and act much differently.”[5] In this book, we explore various ways to approach home-centered family gatherings in ways that can create opportunities for personal and interpersonal revelatory experiences.

At the end of each chapter, we will provide some questions to encourage personal contemplation and couple and family conversation about these issues. We also will pose three questions to encourage what we call “Creating Opportunities for Revelatory Experiences” (CORE)—opportunities that involve intentions, relationships, and activities that might facilitate revelatory experiences. We hope these questions will be helpful for individual consideration and for discussion in group settings such as couple and family gatherings and book groups.

Notes

[1] Russell M. Nelson, “Opening Remarks,” Ensign, November 2018, 7.

[2] See Russell M. Nelson, “Becoming Exemplary Latter-day Saints,” Ensign, November 2018, 113; and Quentin L. Cook, “Deep and Lasting Conversion to Heavenly Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” Ensign, November 2018, 8–11.

[3] See Russell M. Nelson, “Come, Follow Me,” Ensign, May 2019, 89–91; Nelson, “Hear Him,” Ensign, May 2020, 88–92; and Nelson, “Becoming Exemplary Latter-day Saints,” Ensign, October 2018, 113–14.

[4] We began conducting these interviews soon after September 11, 2001 (9/11), and continued the interviews until 2021. We contacted religious leaders in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim congregations across the country and asked them to recommend families from their congregation that they considered to be excellent examples of devoted members of their faith community. We then contacted those families to ask if they would be willing to tell us about ways that their religious beliefs, spiritual practices, and faith communities have influenced their marriage and family lives. All families were dual-parent homes. More than half were from various ethnic minority communities. Families were drawn from seventeen states in all eight socioreligious regions of the nation identified by scholars. These included families from the following regions (and states): the mid-Atlantic (Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania), the Midwest (Ohio, Wisconsin), the Mountain West (Idaho, Utah), New England (Massachusetts, Connecticut), the Northwest (Oregon, Washington), the Pacific (California), the South/Gulf Coast (Florida, Georgia, Louisiana), and the “Southern Crossroads” region (Kansas, Oklahoma).

[5] David A. Bednar, The Spirit of Revelation (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2021), 58; emphasis added.