Church Leaders Speaking to Young Adults

As a youth there were two things that turned my mind toward attending Brigham Young University. The first was a personal story my 9th-grade seminary teacher recounted that involved him as a BYU student teaching missionaries at the Missionary Training Center. The part that stuck with me, the incidental setting for his story, was that BYU is a place that serves the missionaries. That is a holy thing that wouldn’t be found at other colleges.

The second thing was learning that there were weekly devotionals where General Authorities spoke to the entire student body. If there was one school that included teaching from the mouths of prophets and apostles, in addition to the physics and literature classes that all schools have, then I wanted in. The part of that experience that I valued the most once I was there were the Fast Sunday evening firesides at which apostles spoke most months. It was different from General Conference, a looser format and focused on the audience at hand.

Over Christmas I spoke with some current and recent BYU students, and they tell me there is nothing like that now. There are now CES devotional broadcasts without any BYU focus. That sounds like a good thing overall since the bulk of LDS young adults are not at BYU, though it’s too bad that a bit of BYU-centric teaching and preaching couldn’t remain. Like the Saturday evening session of stake conference, BYU gathers a group that can be spoken to more directly and collegially than the church at large.

Last year in 2014, there were five of these CES broadcasts. Two of the speakers were apostles, one was the general Relief Society president, and two were presidents of the Seventy. For 2015, the program has been reduced to three broadcasts, and the first speaker will be Brother Randall L. Ridd, second counselor in the Young Men general presidency. This is quite a step down from last year, and it is a huge drop from what I was allowed to experience as a college student.

Perhaps I should take this as a hint that important duties are calling apostles elsewhere, so important that they are even worth neglecting preaching to young adults at a key formative stage. Or maybe this generation has been neglecting to receive such preaching, and so it is being taken away from them.