Hello, I'm Lynn Hilton Wilson. I am so excited to be able to talk today about Section 1 of the Doctrine of Covenants.

This is Scripture for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I'm overjoyed to have one of those who knows more about it than most of us all put together.

And this is Stephen Harper from Brigham Young University's religion department as well as BYU studies and the

Joseph Smith papers and many, many others. And Steve, it is such an honor to have you here.

Thanks, Lynn. It's great to be with you. Before I began teaching at BYU with you, I was introduced to

you through your wonderful book, Making Sense of the Doctrine Convents.

And that has been a great resource in my life,

but I just wanna thank you from Scripture Central team

for writing up these wonderful stories and details

about the Doctrine Convents that we can have now online

for free for everyone to use in the library of Scripture Central.

So thank you. Do you want to tell us a little about them?

Well, it's a lot of the same work that I did for making sense of Doctrine Covenants, but it was updated, right?

We've done more work, more research. And so they're also a little leaner and more efficient, less boring, hopefully.

Great.

And if you're watching this, I'll give you a click on to how to access Steve's research so that you can get it every single week throughout the Come Follow Me Year.

Today we get to start talking about Section 1. So I want to go back and give you a little bit of background.

If you're watching this on a slide, I also have a timeline. We know the church is organized in 1830 on April 6th in Fayette, New York, and the persecution in upstate New York grows enormously over that first year.

We don't even have 200 members in New York. We have more members

living in Curtland when the Lord gives the revelation to Joseph to move to Curtland. Somewhere early

in February, 1831. 1831. And Joseph's inundated with all these, the church is double the size now.

And everyone wants to spend time with him and he's not

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