Preach My Gospel

What Preach My Gospel is

Preach My Gospel: A Guide to Missionary Service is the official missionary handbook of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, first released in 2004 and significantly revised in 2023. It is the central training and study resource for the Church’s full-time missionaries, and it is organized around four broad jobs: the doctrine missionaries teach, how to study and prepare spiritually, how to develop Christlike attributes, and the practical work of sharing the gospel day to day. It is built as a working guide — chapters carry study questions, scripture references, and space to record impressions — rather than as a book to be read once and shelved.

It is not scripture, and the Church does not present it as such; Latter-day Saints place it among study aids, used alongside the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Church’s other canonical works rather than in place of them. Over time its audience has widened well past the mission field: members use it for personal study, families use parts of it together, and the 2023 revision explicitly addresses that broader use. The whole book presumes the Latter-day Saint doctrinal framework, which is exactly what it is for — a guide written for people who share its premises and want to study and teach within them.

Why Latter-day Saints reach for Preach My Gospel

Most study books hand you content. Preach My Gospel hands you a method. Its premise is that a missionary should not memorize a script and recite it, but should study deeply, understand the doctrine, develop Christlike character, and then teach from that preparation in their own words, adapting to the person in front of them. So the book spends as much energy on how to study and how to become as it does on what to teach. That orientation — toward preparation and attributes rather than toward a fixed presentation — is what makes it distinctive among the Church’s resources and what keeps members returning to it long after a mission ends.

The result is a handbook that works on two levels at once. For the full-time missionary, it is the operating manual of daily service: lessons, planning, finding people to teach, working with local leaders. For the member who is not serving, the same book reads as a structured self-study course in the doctrine and in the attributes of Christ — faith, hope, charity, patience, humility, diligence, obedience — complete with self-assessment and scripture work. That dual usefulness is why the 2023 edition leaned into the broader audience, and why a book originally written for nineteen-year-olds in the field now sits on a lot of members’ study shelves.

The teaching chapters: the doctrine, organized for study and for sharing

The heart of Preach My Gospel is its set of teaching chapters — the doctrine that missionaries teach, laid out topically rather than as a memorized script. These chapters cover the subjects at the center of Latter-day Saint teaching: the message of the Restoration, the plan of salvation, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the commandments, and the practice of living the faith. Each chapter gathers the relevant scripture references, frames the doctrine in plain language, and supplies study questions designed to push the reader from reading toward understanding. The 2023 revision reorganized these chapters and refreshed their language while keeping the same underlying purpose.

What makes the teaching chapters distinctive is that they are built for two motions at once: studying the doctrine for yourself and preparing to teach it to someone else. The book repeatedly asks the reader to study a principle, then to consider how they would help another person understand it — so the same chapter serves a missionary preparing a lesson and a member trying to deepen their own grasp of the material. It is, in effect, a topical guide to how the Church teaches its own doctrine, with the scripture references doing much of the load-bearing work.

Developing Christlike attributes: the chapter members keep returning to

One of the most-used sections of Preach My Gospel is its chapter on developing Christlike attributes. Rather than treating character as a byproduct of activity, the book treats it as something to be studied and deliberately cultivated — and it walks through specific attributes drawn from the life of Christ: faith, hope, charity and love, virtue, knowledge, patience, humility, diligence, and obedience. For each, the chapter offers scriptural grounding, reflection questions, and a self-assessment that asks the reader to consider honestly where they stand and what they might work on.

This is the part of the book that travels furthest beyond the mission field. The attributes chapter does not depend on whether you are teaching anyone — it reads as a structured guide to personal spiritual formation, which is why members who never expected to use a missionary manual keep it for this section. It is also the clearest example of the book’s overall design philosophy: that preparation to teach the gospel and personal growth in the gospel are the same project, approached from two directions.

A study-and-preparation framework, not a script

Preach My Gospel devotes substantial space to how to study — personal study, companion study, and study with others — and to the daily habits of preparation that surround the teaching itself. There are chapters on study skills, on recognizing and recording spiritual impressions, on goal-setting and planning, and on the practical mechanics of missionary work: finding people to teach, working with members and local leaders, and using the Church’s other resources. The book supplies forms, questions, and space to write, so it functions as a workbook a missionary fills in over the course of service.

This framework is the reason the book replaced the older memorized discussions in 2004 and the reason it has held up. By teaching a method of preparation rather than a fixed presentation, it is meant to adapt to different people, settings, and languages without needing to be rewritten for each. For a non-missionary, much of this practical apparatus is skippable — the planning and leadership sections exist for the field — but the study-skills portions are exactly what make the book usable for personal and family study, which is the use the 2023 edition increasingly anticipates.

Pricing

Where Preach My Gospel falls behind

Not scripture, by design. Preach My Gospel is a handbook and study aid, and the Church presents it that way — alongside the standard works rather than as one of them. A reader expecting sacred text, or a devotional written to be read meditatively, will instead find a working manual with study questions and forms. That is the right design for what it is; it just means it is not the book to reach for if you want scripture or daily devotional reading.

Presumes its own framework. The book is written for people who already share the Latter-day Saint doctrinal premises, so it does not stop to argue from the ground up. A newcomer reading it cold will follow the structure easily but will need outside context to understand why the doctrine is framed the way it is. This is normal for an in-house handbook — it is not an introduction for outsiders, and it does not try to be.

Built around teaching others. A large share of the book exists to help a missionary teach the gospel to someone else: lessons, finding people to teach, working with leaders, planning a day in the field. A member who simply wants personal study uses only part of the book and skips the rest. The 2023 revision broadened the personal-study angle, but the center of gravity is still preparation to teach.

A reference book, not a read-through. Preach My Gospel is organized for repeated, selective use — you return to a chapter when you need it — rather than for a single cover-to-cover arc. Read straight through, it can feel like a manual, because it is one. The payoff comes from using it as a workbook over time, not from finishing it in a sitting.

Preach My Gospel vs. Come Follow Me vs. the Book of Mormon

These three sit in different places on a Latter-day Saint’s shelf, and it helps to see what each is for. Preach My Gospel is the missionary-service and teaching-preparation handbook — a guide to how to study the gospel, develop Christlike attributes, and prepare to teach it to others. Come Follow Me is the Church’s home-and-Church study curriculum, a scheduled reading-and-study guide that walks members and families through the scriptures on an annual cycle. The Book of Mormon is scripture itself — the canonical text the other two point back toward.

Different jobs. The Book of Mormon is the source text you study. Come Follow Me is the calendar and curriculum that paces and frames that study week by week for the whole Church. Preach My Gospel is the handbook for the specific task of preparing to teach the gospel and for the personal formation that supports it. A member might read the Book of Mormon as part of the Come Follow Me schedule, and separately use Preach My Gospel to prepare to serve or to work on a Christlike attribute — three resources, three roles, no overlap to resolve.

All three are free in the Gospel Library app and on the Church’s website, and all three are produced or published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The choice between them is not better-or-worse; it is which task you are doing. Studying the text: the Book of Mormon. Following the Church’s study schedule: Come Follow Me. Preparing to teach the gospel or build Christlike attributes: Preach My Gospel.

Alternatives to Preach My Gospel