[GO HERE FOR LATEST UPDATE ABOUT GENERAL CONFERENCE BOOK CLUB]

This may be old news to some of my regular readers, but come conference time, it’s probably no surprise that there’s a lot of search-engine contact and link-sharing that leads to temporarily increased traffic here on Diapers and Divinity.  For that reason, I want to take the opportunity to invite you, long-time reader or new, to participate in our General Conference Book Club.

This Sunday, after conference, we’ll begin Week 1 of a new round.  Here’s how it works:

The goal is to read one General Conference talk a week and discuss it together as an on-line “book club.”

(If you’re not familiar with General Conference or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, go here and here and here for more information.)

A new talk will be posted each Sunday.

You don’t have to do anything to “join” the club– You can just visit the Sunday post at any time during the week and share thoughts, findings, favorite quotes, applications, even questions from the talk of the week. Personally, I think it would be a good idea to subscribe to comments from the post so that we can read each other’s insights and have a “real book club” conversation.  (One way to do this is to click the little box under the comment form that says “Notify me of follow-up comments via email.”)   Or of course, you can just check back often to see what folks are saying.

My own goal is to let each talk guide my personal scripture study throughout the week.  First I’ll read the talk all the way through, then look up and read all the scripture references the speaker quoted, and then break the talk down into segments to study them carefully and find other related scriptures that help me understand it better.  Feel free to share any ideas of how you plan to study or apply the talks we read.  (You’re allowed to do this however you want.  You can simply have a goal to read the talk before the week is over, and that’s good, too.)

Here’s a little button you can put on your own blog if you’d like to. Feel free to invite friends (the real kind and bloggy kind as well) to participate.  The more the merrier.  You can link it directly to this post since it has all the instructions for the Book Club challenge.

<a href=”https://diapersanddivinity.com/gcbc” _mce_href=”https://diapersanddivinity.com/gcbc”><img border=”0″ src=”https://diapersanddivinity.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/genconfbutton1.jpg” _mce_src=”https://diapersanddivinity.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/genconfbutton1.jpg” /></a>

And try to comment when you’ve read each article, even something as simple as “I did it.”  Then we have a certain motivation/accountability to each other to meet our goal of reading all the talks from the previous General Conference. The objective is to read the words of the living prophets and learn from them.  Our book club community is for sharing and encouraging, but please don’t feel pressure that you have to come around and make profound insights or write eloquent summaries.  Just show up and be counted!

So there you have it.  A personal invitation.  Join us.  But go enjoy conference first!