SEEK25 conference in Salt Lake will be a faith-filled experience, local Catholics say

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SALT LAKE CITY — SEEK25, a weeklong conference for spiritual growth, prayer and fellowship organized by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, is coming to Utah Jan. 1-5. The conference will feature keynote speakers, workshops, breakout sessions, Confession, Mass, Adoration, entertainment and opportunities for community building; it is open to all adult Utah Catholics.

This is the first time SEEK will be offered in Utah, but the conference has been celebrated in other cities over the past four years. Among those participating this year will be Bryson Brown, a St. Joseph the Worker parishioner who attended two SEEK conferences while he was a student at Boise State University. After he graduated, Brown became a FOCUS missionary for two years and during that time he attended two other SEEK conferences.  

The Eucharistic adoration at the conferences are among his strongest memories, he said. “Each one I’ve been to there’s been the one moment that stuck out. The stadium or the conference center wherever they’re having it, it’s packed, and then just seeing Christ there in the monstrance and all those people adoring him – that witness is really awe inspiring, I would say, in the truest sense of the word.”

Brown is a convert to the Church and was in RCIA when he attended his first SEEK conference in Indianapolis in 2019. Hearing all the presentations and participating in the workshops was a good grounding in the faith, he said, and he recommends the conference experience to all local Catholics who wish to encounter Christ in a new way.

“I know that it’s right at the beginning of the year during the holiday, but I can’t think of a better way to kick off the new year than spending it with the Lord and with the Catholic Church,” Brown said.

Although originally intended to reach just college-age Catholics, SEEK has expanded in recent years to help older Catholics renew their faith and encounter Christ, said TJ Jakubowski, a FOCUS missionary at the St. Catherine of Siena Newman Center.

Jakubowski, 28, who is originally from Jacksonville, Fla., has been a FOCUS missionary for seven years and has attended five SEEK conferences since 2018.

“SEEK itself has developed to speak to older parishioners who are established in family life or their vocations, who have jobs, and there are additional tracks for people who are beyond college age that focus on bringing a new evangelical zeal and conviction about discipleship to parishes,” he said.

Like Brown, for Jakubowski the experience of gathering with so many other Catholics at SEEK has been powerful. Those who attend SEEK receive a “profound encounter with the community of the Church,” he said. “It’s quite an amazing experience to worship alongside sometimes 10,000 other Catholics in the Mass or in the Eucharist during adoration.”

SEEK “highlights the value of community, and it helped instill in me further, even as a missionary, the need to not live the Christian life in isolation,” he said.

This will be the first opportunity to attend a SEEK conference for another St. Joseph the Worker parishioner: Sofia Arriaga, 17, who was chosen as one of four people to represent her parish at SEEK 25.

“I think right now, the world is struggling a lot with the youth,” she said. “I think that right now, it’s especially hard to remain faithful with all this new technology, with all these new temptations; with everything, it’s so hard to try to remain a faithful Catholic. And so, I think that by me going and representing I can show others that, you know, despite all these hardships we can still try to remain as faithful as we can, but it also helps me and gives me that confidence to remain in my faith.”

Arriaga is especially looking forward to the presentations by Father Mike Schmitz, who is the host of the podcasts “Bible in a Year” and “The Catechism in a Year.” Arriaga listens to these regularly. She also plans to bring to the conference a friend who is in the process of converting to the Church because “it would be a great experience for him to go and to also build up his own faith,” she said.

In addition, Arriaga is looking forward to meeting and connecting with other young Catholics.

“It’s hard trying to find friends, trying to find a group or a community to fit in, especially here in Salt Lake,” she said. “I mean, there’s rarely any Catholics, and especially not young Catholics, right? And so, I think right now the focus needs to be on family, but family doesn’t necessarily have to be connected by blood. I think sticking together has always been such an important part in our faith. Right now, it’s an important time to stick together and to try to bind ourselves to each other so that we can all help each other get to the ultimate goal, which is to serve God and get to heaven.”

For information or to register for SEEK25, visit https://seek.focus.org/salt-lake-city/