This year marks the 100-year anniversary for the family home evening program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
While a century has seen the world change in countless ways, the emphasis on weekly home-based gospel instruction remains the same.
In the early 1900s, the LDS Church demographic began to shift from rural to urban. As families left farming for city life, church leaders were inspired to start a home evening program that would concentrate family gospel instruction to at least once a month.
The First Presidency of the time, President Joseph F. Smith and counselors President Anthon H. Lund and President Charles W. Penrose, made this promise in a letter introducing the program: "If the Saints obey this counsel, we promise that great blessings will result. Love at home and obedience to parents will increase. Faith will be developed in the hearts of the youth of Israel, and they will gain power to combat the evil influence and temptations which beset them" (see "100 Years of Family Home Evening," Ensign, April 2015).
The admonition to conduct home evening was renewed in 1964 with the publication of a family manual. Parents were encouraged to hold meetings once a week, and the term family home evening was born.
Today, the continued emphasis on family home evening is a testament to its universality in strengthening families. It serves as a reminder to parents that the most important gospel instruction happens in the home.
For Tammy Lively of Redmond, Washington, family home evening has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember. Her weekly home evenings as a child were filled with games and laughter.
Now, as a wife and mother, she has spent the past decade opening her home to single sisters who want a home-cooked meal and a place to gather Monday evenings.
The sisters, many of whom have been coming for more than eight years, are from all walks of life. For the moment, not one of them is actually within Lively's ward boundaries, and one has chosen to stop coming to church, but that doesn’t keep her from attending family home evening.
The group shares a unique bond. They sing, they hug, they share food and play a whole host of laughter-filled games. They also participate in service activities such as taking meals to shut-ins or cleaning the homes and yards of people in need.
“The biggest effect on my life is the strength that these incredible women bring into our home,” Lively said. “My testimony of FHE is that it makes us take time, for the one day, to laugh, to giggle, to learn, to love, to serve, which in this busy world we would never do. I will do this over and over again for the rest of my life.”
David C. Dollahite, a professor of family life at Brigham Young University, sees family home evening as a hallmark of the Latter-day Saint faith.
“Religious families have a heightened sense of the sacred nature of the family, Mormons in particular," he said. "Family home evening is indicative of the kind of focus Latter-day Saints put on family relations and faith."
Dollahite has done extensive research on sacred rituals in the home through a project called “The American Families of Faith,” which is online at americanfamiliesoffaith.byu.edu The research involved interviewing hundreds of families of various faiths and ethnicities.
While Dollahite found that many families have faith-based rituals such as mealtime prayers and Sabbath worship, there is no other sacred ritual quite like family home evening.
“When families make the effort to gather on a weekly basis for a sacred purpose, it has all kinds of deep and profound benefits beyond which any given family might realize at the time,” he said. “Rituals have protective benefits for children. Children feel the sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves.”
Through his interviews, Dollahite found the most important part of family home evening was not the song, the prayers, the calendaring, the lesson or even the beloved treat. It was the informal gospel conversation and the sharing of ideas that really mattered.
This realization helped Dollahite change the way he structured FHE in his home. Gone were the formal lessons. In their place, family members took turns picking gospel topics.
“The sooner that parents can engage with kids in conversation, the better it will be for the quality of the instruction, even with younger kids,” Dollahite said.
Even though the nature of family time has changed over 100 years, Dollahite said with the invasion of technology into the minutiae of daily life, FHE is more crucial than ever.
“There’s a connection, a unity, that takes place in that setting that’s deeper and more profound than anything else," he said. "There needs to be a place for families on a regular basis to talk about the things of the soul. I don't think the church can overestimate the profound power of family home evening.”
Emily Gurney has seen the results firsthand in her home. A mother of six, she is the creator of the popular Reality FHE blog online at realityfhe.blogspot.com. She felt inspired to start the blog after a lesson in which she asked the Relief Society members which commandment was their biggest struggle.
The unanimous answer was family home evening.
“We’ve turned it into a complicated thing with a lot of expectations, and that’s not what it’s supposed to be,” said Gurney, who lives in Lehi.
So Gurney went back to the roots of FHE. The more she understood the purpose of the original admonition, the simpler her lessons became. She wanted lessons that didn’t require a trip to the grocery store or a fancy color printer.
She had one simple goal: to teach her children the gospel in an environment of love.
“There’s no way I can lay out every facet of the gospel, but I want them to know what truth feels like and where to find it,” Gurney said. “I want them to know what the spirit looks like.”
With six children under the age of 12, Gurney is realistic about how family home evening plays out in her home.
“It’s a total circus,” she said, but that doesn’t deter her. “The families I know that have FHE on a regular basis have one thing in common: They do what works for them. It also helps if one parent has their sense of humor intact at all times.”
Above all, she keeps it simple, using only about five or 10 minutes between dinner and cleanup to put together a lesson.
Gurney draws upon three areas for her FHE lessons: things she might be frustrated with at home, her personal study or questions that come from her children.
“We will be doing a lesson on kindness and obedience probably forever,” she said. “But those FHE promises about increased obedience, protection from evil and abundant joy? We are experiencing those things.”
Tiffany Gee Lewis runs the newly launched site Raise the Boys (www.raisetheboys.com), dedicated to raising creative, kind, courageous and competent boys. Follow on Instagram and Twitter at raisetheboys. Email: tiffanyelewis@gmail.com.