In Dyer and Kunz’s study of effective Mormon families (Effective Mormon Families), they found that only 28 percent of effective Mormon families read their scriptures regularly. Eder Gene R. Cook has estimated from traveling as a General Authority that only 10 to 15 percent of Church members read the scriptures together as families.
See
Raising Up a Family to the Lord, p. 110
A recent study conducted by the Church has forcefully confirmed statistically what we have been told again and again. That is, if loving, inspired instruction and example are not provided at home, then our related efforts for success in and around Church programs are severely limited. It is increasingly clear that we must teach the gospel to our families personally, live those teachings in our homes, or run the risk of discovering too late that a Primary teacher or priesthood adviser or seminary instructor could not do for our children what we would not do for them.
Jeffrey R. Holland, “
Within the Clasp of Your Arms,” Ensign, May 1983, p. 36
Presently the Book of Mormon is studied in our Sunday School and seminary classes every fourth year. This four-year pattern, however, must not be followed by Church members in their personal study of the standard works. All scripture is not of equal value.
Ezra Taft Benson,
A Witness and a Warning, p. vii
True doctrine, understood, changes attitudes and behavior. The study of the doctrines of the gospel will improve behavior quicker than the study of behavior will improve behavior.
Boyd K. Packer, Conference Report, October, 1986, p. 20
I have a vision of homes alerted, of classes alive, and of pulpits aflame with the spirit of Book of Mormon messages. I have a vision of home teachers and visiting teachers, ward and branch officers, and stake and mission leaders counseling our people out of the most correct of any book on earth—the Book of Mormon. I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon. I have a vision of thousands of missionaries going into the mission field with hundreds of passages memorized from the Book of Mormon so that they might feed the needs of a spiritually famished world. I have a vision of the whole Church getting nearer to God by abiding by the precepts of the Book of Mormon. Indeed, I have a vision of flooding the earth with the Book of Mormon.
Ezra Taft Benson,
Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon, 1988, 4-5