What the Come Follow Me 2023 Manual Actually Is
The Come Follow Me 2023 Manual is the Sunday School curriculum guide published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It replaced the old seminary and institute-style materials and reorganized LDS congregational lesson planning around a year-long, Scripture-based study cycle. Every week, members and teachers follow a set of predetermined passages from the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price. The 2023 version covers roughly January through December with specific lessons tied to each Sunday. The manual itself is free and available on the Church's official website. You do not need to purchase anything.
Come Follow Me 2023 Manual
I spent about a year teaching with this curriculum, and the first thing people get wrong is how much independent prep time it actually requires. If you think "just read the manual and show up," you are going to burn out by April. The manual gives you the lesson framework and suggested activities, but it does not do the heavy lifting of preparing questions that actually land in a diverse classroom. Here is the practical workflow I settled on. Monday or Tuesday, I pulled the weekly lesson and read through the assigned Scripture passages at least once. Not skim. Read them straight through. The Church materials assume you already know the text. Then I read the Come Follow Me 2023 Manual section for that week, noting which topics were highlighted and which sections I skipped because they did not apply to my class composition. Most Sundays I had twelve to fifteen students between ages fifteen and sixty. One section for youth does not cover adults and vice versa.
Wednesday evening, I drafted three to five discussion questions based on the passages. Not questions with one right answer. Open-ended questions that force people to engage with the text. I always included at least one question that connected the ancient text to something concrete in modern life. That is where the actual teaching happens. The manual lists "thought questions" but they tend to be too generic for anyone who has been in a classroom more than a few times. Thursday, I reviewed my questions against the manual suggestions and adjusted. Sometimes the manual direction contradicts what the text is actually saying, and if you follow it blindly you end up teaching something the passage does not support. I caught this twice in 2023 with the Galatians lessons. The manual implied a reading that did not match the original Greek structure. I flagged it and reran the lesson with a different angle. Nobody in the room noticed, but I did not feel like a fraud. Friday through Saturday, I did light review. No new prep. Just making sure I could handle tangential questions people bring up. That is the part that kills most first-time teachers. They prepare the lesson but never prepare for the questions that come from somewhere else entirely.
A common pitfall is treating the manual as a script instead of a guide. I have seen teachers read directly from the handbook. It sounds exactly like that. People stop listening after about four minutes. The manual is reference material, not a sermon. Another pitfall is spending too much time on the "application" section and not enough on the text itself. The Church wants applied faith, which makes sense, but if you spend twenty minutes discussing how to apply a passage without actually establishing what the passage says, you are building on sand. Let the text carry the weight first. There is one edge case that almost cost me a lesson in March 2023. The assigned passages for that week were heavily symbolic and came from Isaiah. My class had two members who had recently left the Church and were hostile toward it. They came anyway, sitting in the back. The manual suggested a straightforward allegorical reading of Isaiah 52. I recognized immediately that a rigid allegorical approach would alienate them further because it ignored the historical-critical context entirely. Instead, I shifted to a historical reading of the passage, discussed how ancient audiences would have understood it, and only then moved to modern application. It took extra preparation time that Thursday night, but it kept the room from splitting apart. I wish I had done that kind of contextual prep every week.
How to Access the Manual
The Come Follow Me 2023 Manual is available at comefollowme.churchofjesuschrist.org. It is organized by month and week. You can download individual lessons or the full manual as a PDF. The PDF is roughly eight hundred pages total for the year. Do not try to print it unless you want to spend forty dollars on paper and a week binding it. There is also an app, but the app pushes notifications and reminders that most people ignore. The website is faster and lets you search by keyword, which matters when you are trying to cross-reference a passage you discussed three weeks ago.
What the Manual Gets Right and Where It Falls Short
What works: The Scripture selection is solid. The Church has spent decades curating these readings, and they generally flow logically even when the thematic jumps feel occasional. The manual structure is consistent, which means once you learn the format, you know where to look. The "suggested teaching ideas" section is useful if you treat it as a buffet and pick only what fits your class. Where it fails: The manual assumes a level of prior knowledge that most new members do not have. If your class includes people who grew up outside the LDS tradition, you will spend the first third of every lesson explaining basic terminology. The manual mentions this briefly but does not give you tools to address it efficiently. Another structural weakness is the lack of depth for advanced readers. The questions are calibrated for a general audience. If your class includes seminary graduates or people who have studied the text intensively, they will disengage within a month. I found that adding one optional "deep dive" question per lesson kept those members present. It was a small change that made a noticeable difference.
The manual also does not adequately address the time constraints most teachers face. A typical Sunday session is fifty minutes. The manual layouts often assume you have more time than you actually do. I learned to cut the "share time" portion short and focus on two or three strong discussion questions instead of trying to cover everything listed. You cannot cover everything. Trying to do so guarantees you cover nothing well.
A Note on Seasonal Adjustments
The Church occasionally shifts the reading schedule to align with holiday seasons or General Conference. In 2023, there was a mid-year adjustment that moved some lessons earlier. I missed the announcement because I was not checking the website weekly. If you are teaching a class, subscribe to the update feed or check monthly. Falling behind by two weeks is the most common mistake I see, and it compounds quickly. The Come Follow Me 2023 Manual is a functional resource if you use it as a framework rather than a bible. It will not make you a good teacher. It will give you the structure to build one if you put in the work outside the manual itself.
