The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (inadvertently referred to as the “Mormon” Church by the media and others) recently announced changes in leadership and training for LDS women to reflect the Church’s increasingly global membership.
There are no bad hair days at the McKnight home!
Mindy McKnight has 5 daughters (and one lone son) and sent her girls to school with hair masterpieces. The girls’ friends, and friends’ mothers, wanted to know how to do the dos. So, Mindy McKnight began the Cute Girls Hairstyles blog to share requested “how- tos” for her daughters’ hairstyles.
One morning, Mindy made a couple of videos for friends demonstrating how to do trickier hair dos and posted the video on YouTube. She really didn’t think about the videos again.
YouTube contacted Mindy about six months later to see if she would host a YouTube channel because the videos had become extremely popular. The Cute Girls Hairstyles YouTube channel has 1.6 million subscribers and posts new hairstyle (more…)
I became a “Mormon girl” (a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which church is often inadvertently referred to as the “Mormon Church”) just after my seventeenth birthday. I had spent a lot of time observing the Mormon girls I knew so I could figure out how to be like them. Some things were obvious, although it took time to understand just why they did them.
For instance, the girls dressed modestly. They were fashionable and many were popular. One was prom queen and one was the captain of the drill team. They didn’t look stodgy or old-fashioned or out of touch at all. Their clothes were cute, but modest. I learned that both Mormon boys and girls were taught to be modest to show respect for themselves and for their Heavenly Father. God created them in His own image. Their bodies were gifts from Him. Those two facts motivated them to be respectful of that gift by not using it to gain inappropriate attention.
Mormon Girls Set High Standards
I also noticed that Mormon girls had standards and they lived up to them—even when no one was watching. That was particularly interesting to me. Most of the girls had thought it over, prayed about it, and decided they wanted to live to a high moral standard. One eighteen-year-old who taught my daughter the summer after her graduation told her students that she had been homecoming queen and the head cheerleader and had never once found it necessary to lower her standards in order to be popular. She wanted to be liked for who she really was, not someone who did whatever it took to be popular—even if it made her feel awful inside. Instead, she kept her standards and was popular while feeling great about herself. (more…)
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (often inadvertently referred to as the Mormon Church) is well known for its worldwide missionary work. Many people recognize the young missionaries by their nametags and Sunday-best dress. For decades the age for men to enter full-time missionary service was 19, with the women able to serve at 21. Last year, the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ changed the policy so that now young men can leave at 18 and young women at 19. This age change has had a swift and significant impact on Mormon missionary service throughout the world. One of those changes is that more Mormon women are opting to serve missions, and that change has had an impact on the Church’s entire missionary program.
Women Now Account for Half of Full-time Mormon Missionary Applications
In October 2012, the prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ, President Thomas S. Monson, announced the missionary age change, a change that sent ripples of excitement throughout church membership. Now that women are permitted to serve missions two full years before they otherwise would have been, applications from Mormon women have been flooding the Church’s missionary department. Where a year ago, applications from women constituted only about 15 percent of all incoming applications, today 50 percent of missionary papers are submitted by women. (more…)
A group of Mesa, Arizona boys have started a new trend among Mormon boys. A leader for the Mormon teen girls, Jayme Bawden, was looking for something special to show the Mormon girls at their annual conference. She remembered another group of Mormons in her previous church organization who asked the boys to make a video for the girls to watch at this conference. She asked the boys in her new home to do the same and they did. They used a popular song called “What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction and created a music video which was shown to the girls at their conference.
The video was very popular with the girls, who were touched that the boys had delivered this message to them. The video ended up on YouTube and other groups of Mormon boys began doing the same for the girls in their own congregations to watch at their conferences and camps. Some added additional features. For instance, in one, the boys were asked what they felt made a girl beautiful. The girls fell silent as they listened to these hard-to-access insights. In many camps, the girls requested the video time and again. (more…)