‘We are the now’ — Missouri college students organize statewide Catholic summit

"There was a real community aspect to this."

A few years ago, Archbishop Shawn McKnight floated an idea in his previous diocese, the Diocese of Jefferson City, Missouri.

He wanted to host a Catholic local conference for the state’s college students.

Limited resources, an episcopal move, and the chaos of daily diocesan life placed the idea on a chancery back-burner, left simmering but untouched.

Until a senior at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) learned about the idea.

Emma Johnson, a senior majoring in hospitality management, thought a conference would be a great event for the state’s young adult community.

In prayer, she felt prompted to help organize and plan it.

Emma Johnson (front) and other college students during their day long meeting to plan the Missouri Catholic Summit. Courtesy photo.

Johnson had spent two summers as an intern for the Archdiocese of St. Louis’ Office of Youth Ministry, helping to plan and coordinate the annual Steubenville Youth Conferences hosted by the archdiocese.

She figured her experience would be helpful in planning a conference for college students.

But first, she needed to convince the diocese to help make the idea a reality.

So when Johnson saw Maureen Quinn, the director of youth and young adult ministry for the Diocese of Jefferson City, at Mass, she leapt at the opportunity to pitch her idea.

“Maureen was so down with the idea,” Johnson told The Pillar. “When I saw her, I definitely expected to have to convince her. But that’s just Maureen, she’s super excited to take on something like this.”

“There was really no convincing needed. She gave me her business card and said we’ll be in touch.”

“And the next thing you know, we are rounding up people from every university in the diocese to help plan this thing.”

A year and a half later, the conference will take place at the end of this month, Feb. 28, at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Jefferson City. So far, about 200 people have signed up, and the organizers are hoping for another hundred.

Plans for the day have been enhanced with the input and leadership of local students, and now Quinn is excited that the project, first floated back when the now-college seniors were still in high school, is coming to fruition.

“At the end of the day, we want this to be for them,” Quinn told The Pillar. “Having their voices be part of that and really help steer this helps the success of the entire opportunity. If we’re going to invest in something like this, we want it to be successful, and we have always found in ministry the more we get people involved that are really going to be part of that program, the more success that opportunity is going to have.”

From the outset, Quinn wanted the proposed summit to bring together college students and young adults from across Missouri. As the initial planning phase kicked off last winter, Quinn reached out to students at three local Newman Centers — Mizzou, Truman State University and Missouri Science and Technology (S&T) — inviting them to find students to join the planning committee.

“We are not just Mizzou, which is our largest Newman Center,” Quinn said. “We have three very unique Newman Centers and they all have such different communities. So, it was really important to get voices from all three locations in that planning process.”

Each Newman Center recruited two students to help plan the event. Kayle Gough, a sophomore nursing student at Truman University, gladly volunteered when approached. He said he sees the day as a unique opportunity to help his fellow young adults.

“We are a smaller university with a small Catholic community, so I really saw the fruit in connecting with other Newman Centers around the state and other college students as it really shows the testament of our Catholic faith and how we’re universal,” Gough told The Pillar.

Over a series of monthly, and eventually weekly, Zoom meetings, plus an in-person, day-long gathering, the team of college students and Quinn set about organizing the one-day summit.

While Quinn and other diocesan personnel sat in to provide support and help with logistical matters such as speakers, food, and venue, the college students brainstormed the vision, discussed a focus for the event, and identified potential speakers.

“They are really the ones who helped create the theme and the overall vision for the day,” Quinn said.

For a theme, the group settled on a paragraph from the very beginning of the Catechism: “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness, freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength.”

This quote, the group decided, provided a framework that would be beneficial for young students to reflect on and pray with.

“College students often feel isolated, alone, lost in their faith,” Gough said. “By going back to Catechism 1, it really takes us back to the root of knowing that we were created by God and created for God. For college students, in their moments of busyness, their distractions, their isolation on their college campuses, God is always there for them.”

In building the agenda for the day, the planners kept the timing of events in mind.

“It’s a three-hour drive for some people attending, so we had to try to keep it like kind of within nine-to-nine, so people could still get home if they wanted to, because we don’t want people to have to pay for a hotel or anything since we are trying to keep it all free,” Johnson said.

“We wanted to do the men’s and women’s sessions because we thought that it would be good to have a talk speaking directly to each group.”

They also made sure there was free time during the day.

“Sitting through a bunch of talks is a hard ask for students who maybe aren’t that into the faith,” Johnson said. “That way the day isn’t too long or anything.”

Organizers also reached out to the schools and parishes across Missouri, inviting them to attend the event.

“I’ve been emailing every single parish in the state. I’m still getting through it, you never think that there are this many parishes until you have to email all of them,” Johnson said. “We talked a lot about how this is a really good thing for a lot of people who are more rural, or don’t have a great young adult community at their parish, so I wanted to make sure that no parish was forgotten.”

So far, parishes and schools are responding well, excited about the initiative and opportunity for young Catholics to gather together.

“A lot of the people that I emailed are really excited. The other schools that we’ve contacted are pretty excited. We are talking to people from Southern University of Illinois, Edwardsville and people from Rockhurst University in Kansas City, and their students are coming,” Johnson said.

“Everyone sounds excited, especially because it’s free and the meals are free. I think it’s a really easy event that people are willing to go to.”

“We’ve seen a lot of interest in the summit from our Newman Center,” Gough said. “What’s helped a lot of the interest is it’s one day, it’s just a two-hour trip to Jeff City as opposed to going to a bigger conference in Ohio or down in Texas, and the cost of it is completely free so that’s really enticing to college students.”

Enlisting the talent and help of college students has been an asset to the planning process, Quinn said, something that is often underutilized in the Church today.

“In our office, we have limited resources. I oversee religious education, youth and young adult ministry, which is really common across the United States, but that means I am spread thin,” she said. “But because of these college students’ desire to really make this happen and really put a lot of effort into it, to see their willingness to really step in and help make this happen, made this project feasible.”

“Their enthusiasm helped us understand and really see that they really desired this, but it also helped us know that we weren’t doing this alone, that there was a real community aspect to this,” she added.

Gough said that having local college students plan the event creates a more personalized experience, curated to the specific needs of a local community.

“We are the ones with feet on the ground. We know what is going on on their college campuses and in their Newman Center and what their peers and community needs to experience and needs to hear.

“This summit is the fruit of that lived experience.”

For the college students who planned the event, the process also offered the lesson that individuals – and not just dioceses or Catholic organizations – have a role to play in the Church.

“We are the future, but we are also the now,” Johnson said. “If we really want to make something happen, we can do it. It might be hard at times, but it can definitely still happen, especially something that you think the Lord really wants you to do and is calling you to do.”