Teaching the Gospel Through Activities in Carry On

Speaking at the 1915 June Conference of the Young Ladies’ and Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations (MIA), board member Mary E. Connelly titled her address “Teaching the Gospel Through M. I. A. Activities.” She reminded the assembled MIA officers of their fundamental goal to instill testimonies of the gospel in the hearts of the young people of Zion. She then laid out a rationale for sponsoring activities as part of this effort.

When Connelly spoke, the MIA was in the midst of a decade of rapid, intensive expansion of activities offered under its auspices. Just that year, the YLMIA had inaugurated the Bee-Hive Girls program, which paralleled the Boy Scout program adopted by the YMMIA two years earlier. The first girls’ camp had been held in 1912. By the time of Connelly’s address, the associations sponsored contests on the local, stake, and general levels in oratory, debate, storytelling, music, and athletics. Class work, as she called it, had been the traditional mainstay of the programs, with lessons focused on gospel subjects and church history as well as literature, art, and other topics of broad interest. Now with the increase in activities, she acknowledged, “some people feared that they [the MIA] were getting away from the Gospel.”

“That is a mistaken idea,” Connelly continued. Contests offered an opportunity to teach “brotherliness, justice, honesty, truth, integrity, [and] glorying in the success of others.” Speech and debate prepared young people to speak with confidence and logical thinking. Music brought inspiration and spiritual growth. And as the young people joined together in these activities, they experienced the gospel standard of brotherliness. “The rich and the poor in this world’s goods have mingled together in love and companionship, being drawn together by the union of like ideals and of similar spiritual and intellectual interests.” All through the work, she declared, “everywhere is the Gospel standard.” MIA activities were preparing young women and men for the duties of life and teaching them “to make righteousness the law of their lives.”

Mary Connelly’s remarks articulated the framework of “teaching the gospel through activities” that would propel the MIA for more than half a century, culminating by mid-century in the massive dance, drama, speech, and music festivals that drew thousands of young Latter-day Saints to Salt Lake City every year for June Conference until it was discontinued in 1975.

This is one of the stories we tell in the new book Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024. Over the course of its 150-year history, the Young Women organization has at times expanded and contracted its emphasis on activities, depending on changing perceptions of young women’s needs and how best to meet them. But just as Mary Connelly said in 1915, the goal has always been to instill faith, testimony, and commitment in young women—and to help them have fun along the way.

Source: Mary E. Connelly, “Teaching the Gospel Through M. I. A. Activities,” Young Woman’s Journal, Aug. 1915, 506–508.