Conference by the Numbers: April 2023 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Adam Washburn
2 min readApr 30, 2023

--

I promised myself that whatever happened in my operating room, I would never lose control of my emotions. I also vowed that day never to throw anything in anger — whether it be scalpels or words.

— President Russell M. Nelson

First item of business, if there’s one talk you should review from April 2023 General Conference, it’s President Nelson’s talk “Peacemakers Needed.” If you read that one talk, you’ll understand the theme of many of the words that are emphasized in this conference. You’ll also encounter many of the unique surgical words that President Nelson employs in his talk.

What other words were emphasized in conference? Looking at the infographic, I found a few themes.

The Easter Theme: Easter, resurrection, Sunday, Atonement, Savior’s

The Peace/Contention Theme: contention, repent, ministering, loved, disciples, poise

The Covenant Theme: disciples, covenant, blessing, perfect

There are some other ways you could group the themes, but those are a few that I pulled out.

Two emphasized words that I did not include were Russell & Nelson (for more on this see October 2021). These words have been on the ‘emphasis list’ since President Nelson started his tenure as President of the Church. Since this has been a consistent pattern, I did not include them as something to note for April 2023.

And, if you’re wondering about the use of the word poise, you should take a look at Elder Mark A. Bragg’s talk on “Christlike Poise.”

More of Conference by the Numbers

In the past, I’ve published my results in my blog Visual Scriptures, including my methods for comparing word usages to past conferences. While I’m keeping all my past content in that blog, I’m now publishing my Conference by the Numbers on Medium.com.

You can find some past Conference by the Numbers here:

October 2022
April 2022
October 2021

April 2021

October 2020

--

--

Adam Washburn

PhD Chemist, father of seven kids, and local bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.