Among the alumni in attendance were Conner and Jennifer Wurth, missionaries assigned to Southeast Missouri State University. They are married and live there with their newborn daughter, Isabel.
Both Conner and Jennifer experienced reversions to the Catholic faith while undergrads at the University of Tulsa through the FOCUS missionaries there. The two told their stories to CNA.
Jennifer said that "I didn't go to Mass going into college for most of my freshman year." When she did return to Mass at the end of that year, "my heart wasn't in it."
In her next year, however, a FOCUS missionary at Tulsa invited her to a Bible study, through which she was able to receive the idea "that I was made to be in relationship with Jesus."
"I felt like they loved me back to Jesus," Jennifer said of the missionaries at her campus, "and they were Jesus for me in a lot of ways, that they loved me enough to share the truth with me." A key part of this was the consistent desire of missionaries to meet her where she was, a trait she says she strives to bring to her ministry.
Her husband, Conner, tells a similar story, saying his family stopped practicing the faith regularly while he was in grade school. This, he said, led to a decline in his moral and spiritual life.
However, "something in my upbringing told me church is at least somewhere you should go," he said, and he began attending Mass at irregular intervals shortly before starting at Tulsa. It was after the first Mass of the school year at Tulsa's Newman Center that he met an older student, Adam, who would eventually become his fraternity pledge father and was involved with FOCUS missions.
At this point for Conner, "I was still living the same exact life that I had been living." However, after several invitations from Adam, he ended up attending FOCUS' other large biennial conference, SEEK, in 2013.
It was at the SEEK conference that he took the opportunity to return to confession.
"It was that which brought the desire in me to go back to confession for the first time since my Confirmation five years prior," he said. "During the night that I was going to confession, there was also adoration. That was the first time that I had experienced adoration, so I had never had the opportunity to see Jesus face-to-face like that before."
In addition to Mass offered every morning at SLS, perpetual adoration was available in a makeshift chapel, and the penultimate night of the conference on Thursday was dedicated to an adoration and confession service.
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This adoration service profoundly moved attendant Chris Rueve, a freshman at the University of Missouri - Columbia.
"During adoration, I was overcome with the most joy that I've ever experienced, and I realized that I need to give this to other people and not just keep it for myself," Rueve told CNA after the conference.
The final day of the conference consisted of three additional keynote speeches before Mass was celebrated by Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago.
Mike Sweeney, former first baseman for the Kansas City Royals, urged attendees to "set the world on fire as who we are, as who God wants us to be." He spoke about the importance of friendship with Christ, invitations to others, and an "eternal mindset."
The next speaker was Lisa Brenninkmeyer, of the women's ministry Walking With Purpose, who spoke on spiritual warfare, drawing from her experience as a mother raising children in the faith.
The final keynote speaker of the morning was Jason Evert, co-founder of the Chastity Project, who highlighted the importance of prayer over constant action, even in ministry.