“For too long Mormon women’s voices have been ignored. We, as a people, have suffered because of it.” Elder Steven E. Snow, Church Historian, June 2017 MHA Conference (Hat Tip Juvenile Instructor)
Inspired by my calling as a ward self-reliance specialist, I have started collecting stories about other educational initiatives undertaken in Latter-day Saint history. A story that highlights the contribution of a Mormon woman seem especially apropos in light of the upcoming celebration of Mormon Women’s history:
This story comes from Casey Griffiths’s article “A Century of Seminary” who writes:
Many complex historical forces led to the creation of the seminary program. But in the simplest sense, the program began in the inauspicious setting of a family home evening. Joseph F. Merrill, a newly called member of the Granite Utah Stake presidency, sat listening to his wife, Annie, tell stories from the Bible and the Book of Mormon to their children before they went to bed. “Her list of these stories were so long that her husband often marveled at their number, and frequently sat as spellbound as were the children as she skillfully related them.” When Brother Merrill later asked his wife where she had learned all of the stories, she replied that she had learned most of them in a theology class conducted by Brother James E. Talmage at the Salt Lake Academy, a Church-owned school she had attended as a young girl. Deeply moved by his wife’s effectiveness as a teacher, Brother Merrill immediately began contemplating how other children attending public schools could receive the same kind of spiritual training as his wife. He became obsessed with the idea of providing students with a religious experience as part of the school day, regardless of what kind of school they attended. A few weeks later he presented the rough idea for a new religious education program to the stake presidency.
Of course, while this simple experience captures some of the revelatory forces leading to the creation of seminary, it must be acknowledged that the seminary program was not created in a vacuum.
While some might think that protest and public shaming are the most effective way to change the world or even the Church, this example captures the importance of personal inspiration and innovation in the home. President Nelson once stated that “The home is the laboratory of love and in it resides the most important unit of the Church and of society—the family ” I like how Annie Merrill demonstrated that teenagers could be taught by adapting the best church scholarship of the day in an engaging manner. I am grateful that her stake leaders were able to see the merits of generalizing her success across a larger setting. I give major props the Seminary program for continuing this tradition and being so quick to integrate the Gospel Topics Essays into the curriculum and training instructors how to find the best resources to answer questions.
Further Reading Links:
Register for Women’s Day at FairMormon Conference
Help Doubting Students Choose to “Be Believing,” Elder Renlund Tells Seminary and Institute Teachers (June 2018)
Answering Difficult Questions with Supplemental Resources, Chad H. Webb (July 2017)
The Opportunities and Responsibilities of CES Teachers in the 21st Century, Elder M. Russell Ballard (Feb. 2016)
Janiece Johnson is a transplanted Bay Area, California, native who loves history, design, art, good food, and traveling. She has master’s degrees in American Religious History and Theology from Brigham Young University and Vanderbilt’s Divinity School respectively. She finished her doctoral work at the University of Leicester in England. Janiece has published work on gender and American religious history—specializing in Mormon history and the prosecution for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. She is a co-author of The Witness of Women: First-hand Experiences and Testimonies of the Restoration (Deseret Book, 2016) and general editor of the recently published Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). A visiting professor in Religious Education at BYU-Idaho for the last three years, Janiece will begin as a research fellow for the Maxwell Institute’s Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies at BYU this fall.
Ugo A. Perego received a BS and a MS in Health Sciences from Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) and a PhD in Genetics and Biomolecular Sciences from the University of Pavia (Pavia, Italy) under the mentorship of Professor Antonio Torroni. He is the Director of the Rome Institute Campus, the S&I Coordinator for Central Italy and Malta, and a Visiting Scientist at the University of Pavia. During the past fifteen years, Ugo has given nearly 200 international lectures on DNA topics related to population migrations, ancestry, forensics, and history (including LDS history). Ugo has also authored and co-authored a number of publications, including: “Ancient individuals from the North American Northwest Coast reveal 10,000 years of regional genetic continuity” (in PNAS USA, 2017); “Finding Lehi in America through DNA Analysis” (in Laura Hales’ A Reason for Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine & Church History, 2016); “The first peopling of South America: new evidences from the Y-chromosome haplogroup Q” (in Plos One, 2013); “Reconciling migration models to the Americas with the variation of North American native mitogenomes” (in PNAS USA, 2013); “The Mountain Meadows Massacre and ‘Poisoned Springs’: Scientific Testing of the More Recent, Anthrax Theory” (in International Journal of Legal Medicine, 2012); and “Joseph Smith Jr., the Question of Polygamous Offspring and DNA Analysis” (in Craig Foster and Newell Bringhurst’s The Persistence of Polygamy Vol. 1, 2010). A complete list of his publications is available at 
Ben Spackman received a BA from BYU in Near Eastern Studies and a MA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, where he did several years of further work towards a PhD. He then studied general science at City College of New York. Currently a PhD student in History of Christianity at Claremont Graduate University, Ben’s general focus is the intertwined history of science, religion, and interpretation of scripture. In particular, he studies how shifting worldviews drove changing interpretations and understandings of Genesis, from its ancient Israelite/Babylonian origins through the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, eventually generating today’s conflict between Young Earth Creationism and well-established evolutionary science. Ben taught volunteer Institute and Seminary for a dozen years in the Midwest, New York, and California, has also taught Biblical Hebrew, Book of Mormon, and New Testament at BYU, and recently TA’d a course on God, Darwin, and Design. Ben has published with BYU Studies, Religious Educator, the Maxwell Institute, Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture, and Religion&Politics, and blogs occasionally at 