Trevar Dahl spends an hour before school each morning studying the Bible with seven other teens. “It’s the best way to start the day, and it helps us with a pretty good knowledge of scripture,” said Trevar, a 16-year-old junior at Cloverleaf High School near Lodi. “We attend classes for four years. We call it seminary.”
Seminary, or the study of religious history and scripture among high school students in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly known as the Mormon church), includes courses on the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Mormon and church doctrine, covenants and history. The seminary program has been part of the Mormon tradition for 100 years and has grown from 70 students to nearly 370,000 in more than 140 countries.