Gospel-Oriented Activity Nights

Can’t think of anything to do for a youth or a ward or branch activity night? Here are some ideas to help you think of gospel-oriented activities. Use these ideas. Adapt them. Come up with your own ideas that are fun—and that are based on gospel principles.

Develop Talents and Leadership Skills

• Take a tour of your local library. Find out how to use it fully.

• Hold an ethnic cooking class. Ask a native of another country or a returned missionary to come and show you how to make tasty foreign meals.

• Visit a business that stays open at a time you can go (a newspaper, radio station, grocery store, and so on), and learn about that kind of work.

• Invite someone who is qualified to give you a lesson in first aid.

• Ask someone to teach the group how to lead music. Then form an “orchestra” using your imagination to create instruments out of common household items.

• Plan a fireside for the ward or branch, focusing on an important topic such as missionary work, scripture study, or testimony.

• Invite someone to speak on how to look for and find a job.

Supplement Family Activities

• Have a family history night. Learn how to do family history research or to write a personal history.

• Offer to babysit the children of couples attending the temple—or of sisters attending Relief Society Homemaking night. Plan a group activity for the children.

• Have a letter-writing night when everyone writes a letter to a community leader, a bishop, or a parent.

• Organize a family home evening clinic where everyone shares a favorite activity or lesson.

Serve Others

• Help a charity or nonprofit organization in your community.

• Write letters to the missionaries from your ward or branch.

• Visit the bishop or branch president’s house and perform service for his family, such as cooking, cleaning, or working in the yard.

• Sing for people who are lonely or sad. And don’t wait for Christmas—you can spread cheer on any day.

• Volunteer to prepare and serve dinner at an orphanage or a local homeless shelter.

• Pick up trash in a section of your community.

• Go to a hospital and read stories to children.

Strengthen Testimonies

• Ask the missionaries in your area to conduct a mission preparation workshop.

• Host a special activity to which missionaries can bring their investigators.

• Take turns drawing pictures that represent a story from the scriptures and see if others can guess which scripture story it is.

• Make a play about a Book of Mormon story to perform for the Primary during Sharing Time.

Make Friends in a Wholesome Environment

• Form a dating panel. Have the young women tell the young men what they like to do, what bothers them, and so on, and have the young men do the same.

• Have everyone bring a favorite recipe and make a cookbook.

• Have a Mormon Message brainstorming contest, and create your own Mormon Message posters!

Photograph by Maren Mecham

Photograph by Jed Clark

Photograph by John Luke

Photograph by Janet Thomas