Young Men Mutual Activities

I received a copy of Young Men Mutual Activities by Blair & Tristan Tolman when I was 16. Blair Tolman was my seminary teacher and I won this and one other book for being the first student to memorize all 25 Book of Mormon scripture mastery. I had flipped through the book before, reading an idea here or there, but I actually read the whole thing cover to cover this last week.

As the title suggests, the book is full of ideas for activities with the Young Men. The last chapter even includes ideas for Young Men and Young Women to do together for combined mutual nights. A really neat feature of this book is that if a particular activity will help fulfill a merit badge, the authors always make mention of that.

Many of the activities are practical ideas that will lead to growth and development in the young men. Others are just plain fun activities. One of my favorite suggestions was to play Gospel Family Fued, where the leaders poll various members of the ward and the young men have to guess the top survey results (for example, name an animal in the Book of Mormon).

This book was published in 1998, and so some of the activities are a little outdated. For example, young men can no longer visit an airport and practice finding different gates, etc. Also, the widespread use of the internet and cell phones takes away the challenge from other activities, such as a trivia scavenger hunt. Instead of being able to find people who actually know the answer to the trivia questions, anybody could just look up the answers on the internet, thereby defeating the purpose of the activity (although I did like that a suggested trivia question had to do with Disneyland).

Even though a revised edition may be in order, I still think this book would be a great springboard for new ideas.