ChurchofJesusChrist.org

What ChurchofJesusChrist.org is

ChurchofJesusChrist.org is the official website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It hosts the Church's scriptural canon — the King James Version of the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price — along with the study helps the Church itself publishes: footnotes, the Topical Guide, the Bible Dictionary, the Guide to the Scriptures, maps, and a Joseph Smith Translation appendix. Every verse links into a cross-reference network that spans all four books of the canon.

Around that scriptural core, the site publishes the Come Follow Me curriculum used by households and classes around the world, the full General Conference archive from April 1971 forward, current and back issues of the Liahona, Friend, and For the Strength of Youth magazines, the General Handbook, hymns and children's songs, lesson manuals for every age group, official Church statements, and the public-facing newsroom. An LDS Account ties personal highlights, notes, and bookmarks together across the web and the Gospel Library mobile app.

Why Latter-day Saint readers prefer ChurchofJesusChrist.org

The single biggest practical difference between ChurchofJesusChrist.org and any third-party study site is that this is the official text and the official curriculum, maintained by the publisher itself. When the Church updates a footnote, revises a study help, releases a new edition of a manual, or canonizes a new section of the Doctrine and Covenants, it shows up here first and it shows up here authoritatively. For a Latter-day Saint reader, that single fact removes an entire category of friction — there is never a question of which edition, which translation, or which version of a manual is current.

It is also the place where everything lives together. Come Follow Me on Monday morning, the assigned conference talk on Tuesday, the related Topical Guide entry on Wednesday, a Friend article for family scripture study on Thursday — the Church publishes all of it under one account, with one search, and one set of personal highlights that sync to the phone in your pocket. That kind of integrated, single-publisher study environment simply does not exist anywhere else for Latter-day Saint readers.

The full standard works + cross-references: the canonical text, properly stitched together

The scripture reader on ChurchofJesusChrist.org publishes the full LDS canon — the KJV Bible (Old and New Testaments), the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price — with the Church's own footnotes, chapter headings, the Topical Guide, the Bible Dictionary, the Guide to the Scriptures, the Joseph Smith Translation excerpts, Bible maps, and Bible chronology. Every footnote is a working link. Tap a footnote on Isaiah and you land in 2 Nephi; tap a footnote in D&C 76 and you land in 1 Corinthians 15. The cross-reference network is dense, hand-curated, and one of the genuine craftsmanship achievements of the site.

In practice this is the feature that makes the site indispensable for serious personal study. A reader working through Come Follow Me can move between the Old Testament block, the Book of Mormon parallels the footnotes surface, the conference talks that quote those verses, and the Topical Guide entries that index them — all in a few taps, all in the same reader, all with personal highlights and notes carried along. No third-party LDS app can match the cross-reference density, because the Church itself is the publisher of those footnotes. This sounds like a small thing. In practice it's transformative.

The General Conference archive (1971–present): every talk, searchable, with transcript + audio + video

Every General Conference talk from April 1971 to the most recent session is on the site, organized by year, session, speaker, and topic. Newer talks ship with synchronized transcript, audio, and video; older talks have full transcript and audio. The search index runs across every talk — you can search a phrase you half-remember from a Bednar talk, filter by speaker, filter by year range, and land on the exact paragraph with a permalink and footnotes. Talks cross-reference the scriptures they cite, so a conference quote on faith links straight to Alma 32 or Hebrews 11.

The practical value of this archive is enormous. Speakers preparing a sacrament meeting talk, teachers building a lesson, parents looking for an apostolic statement on a topic, missionaries answering a question — they all start here, and they all find what they need because the archive is genuinely complete. Fifty-plus years of official teaching, fully searchable, free, and woven into the same reader as the scriptures themselves. There is no equivalent on any other denominational website at this scale.

Come Follow Me + manuals + magazines: the curriculum the whole Church is studying with you

Come Follow Me is the home-centered, Church-supported study program the entire Latter-day Saint community is following on a synchronized weekly schedule. The full curriculum lives on ChurchofJesusChrist.org — the weekly reading block, the household study outline, the Sunday class outlines (Gospel Doctrine, Primary, Youth), the Friend and Liahona articles tied to that week's passages, and the conference talks that bear on the same material. Each week's page links into the scripture text, the relevant manuals, and the magazines, so a family or an individual can move from the weekly outline to the underlying chapters and back without ever leaving the site.

Around Come Follow Me sit the rest of the Church's instructional library — lesson manuals for every age group from nursery through institute, the General Handbook for leaders, hymns and children's songbook, the For the Strength of Youth guide, official seminary and institute curricula, and the current Liahona and Friend magazines (plus deep back issues). For anyone teaching, leading, or studying inside a Latter-day Saint context, this is the single library that everything else routes through. It is the reason members open the site every week, not just every once in a while.

Pricing

Where ChurchofJesusChrist.org falls behind

No original-language study tools. The official text on the site is the King James Version in English, without Hebrew, Greek, or even formal interlinear access. Readers who want to study a Hebrew word in Genesis or a Greek word in Romans alongside the LDS footnotes have to bring those tools from elsewhere — Blue Letter Bible, STEP Bible, or a dedicated package like Logos. The site is not trying to be a language workstation, but the absence is real for serious students.

No third-party commentary integration. The Church publishes its own study helps and institute manuals, and those are excellent for what they are, but you will not find Royal Skousen's textual work on the Book of Mormon, Grant Hardy's reader's edition apparatus, the Givens' theological essays, Joseph Smith Papers transcriptions, or BYU Studies articles inside the reader. Scripture Central and the Joseph Smith Papers website fill that gap, but they are separate destinations.

Search is good, not great. The site's search has improved dramatically over the past few years and now indexes every conference talk and every scripture verse, but locating a half-remembered phrase from a 1980s talk or a footnote in a back-issue Ensign article can still take more attempts than it should. Power users tend to lean on Google with a `site:churchofjesuschrist.org` prefix.

No social or community layer. There are no shared reading plans, no public note-sharing, no discussion threads, no comments. This is a deliberate design choice that fits the Church's posture, but readers coming from YouVersion or Bible.com will notice that the personal-study experience is genuinely solo by default.

The interface rewards exploration, and most users never explore. The Topical Guide, the Bible Dictionary, the Guide to the Scriptures, the maps, the JST excerpts, the hymn search, the General Handbook — they are all here, all free, all linked into the reader, and the average member uses maybe a third of what is available. A better onboarding tour would help.

ChurchofJesusChrist.org vs. Scripture Central vs. BYU Religious Studies

Different strengths. ChurchofJesusChrist.org is the official publisher — the canonical text, the official curriculum, the General Conference archive, the manuals, the magazines, and the cross-references that the Church itself maintains. It is the spine of weekly study. Scripture Central is the leading independent Latter-day Saint scholarship hub — short videos, scholarly articles, the ScripturePlus app, KnoWhys, podcasts, and conferences, with an emphasis on context, evidences, and scholarship around the Book of Mormon and the rest of the canon. BYU Religious Studies (publications like the Religious Educator and BYU Studies Quarterly) is the academic peer-reviewed wing — longer journal articles, doctoral-level work, and book-length monographs.

For weekday study and Sunday class prep, ChurchofJesusChrist.org is the default. For deeper context on a passage, a doctrine, or a historical question, Scripture Central is the natural second stop — it is built to plug into a Come Follow Me workflow. For academic depth, footnoted research, and longer-form analysis, BYU Religious Studies and BYU Studies Quarterly are where serious readers go. Most Latter-day Saint readers will use all three in some combination; the official site is the one that gets opened every day.

The Church's site is also the only one of the three that holds the official text and the curriculum the whole Church is studying together. Scripture Central and BYU Religious Studies sit around it — complementary, not competing.

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