Arise – the 2025 Columbus Catholic Young Adult Conference – encouraged young adults to take heart because Christ is calling them.
The theme was inspired by Mark 10:49: “And they called the blind man, saying to him, ‘Take heart, rise, He is calling you.”’
Often influenced by secular forces and worldly temptations, young adults were challenged to follow Christ instead.
The conference, in its seventh year, was hosted for the first time by Westerville St. Paul the Apostle Church.
“I want you to hear it from a pastor how incredibly important you are, how precious you are,” said Father Jonathan Wilson, pastor at St. Paul. “So many of your peers have received the faith and said something is missing for them, and we know that means they didn’t experience the fullness of the faith.
“Your presence here today is so incredibly important, as we want to be able to share this precious gift with your generation, perhaps in a way that previous generations never received.”
A total of 319 individuals attended the conference, 22 of whom were consecrated religious men and women – representing seven religious orders – and seminarians.
Religious orders present included the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist; Little Servant Sisters of the Immaculate Conception; Daughters of Holy Mary of the Heart of Jesus; Children of Mary; Mercedarian Fathers; Fathers of Mercy; and Pallottine Fathers.
Young adults ages 24-29 constituted the largest age demographic with 92 attendees followed by 83 young adults ages 18-23. Forty-two individuals were ages 30-35 and 22 participants were ages 36+. (Ages were not collected from exhibitors, volunteers and many religious.)
Participants came from several Ohio dioceses. A number of attendees came from out of state, including from Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Texas, West Virginia, Missouri, Illinois, Georgia, Colorado and Arizona.
Keynote speakers at this year’s conference included Paul Kim of Paul J. Kim ministries and Father William Slattery, a priest serving in the Columbus diocese.
Brad Pierron of Damascus Catholic Mission Campus in Knox County served as the master of ceremonies. More than 60 missionaries from Damascus attended the conference.
Breakout sessions were offered by Fathers P.J. Brandimarti, pastor of Johnstown Church of the Ascension, and Sam Severance, parochial vicar at Hilliard St. Brendan the Navigator Church, who spoke about mission and discipleship, respectively.
John Mullen of the Saint Paul’s Outreach apostolate offered a men’s session and Emily Knuth of Damascus Ministries a session for women.
Twenty-one exhibitor organizations were present, and the conference had 19 sponsors.
The event was held in the parish’s Klinger Center, adjacent to the main church.
Attendees gathered in the church sanctuary for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet and for the parish’s 4 p.m. Mass of Anticipation for Sunday Mass.
“I am humbled and proud of the board and planning committee for all the hundreds of hours that went into putting on the 2025 conference – our highest attended one,” said Maria Tarbell, president of the non-profit organization for the conference.
“There were three of us from the board co-leading the conference – myself, Mary Jeffries and Denis Veneziano – and Nathan Forsthoefel from St. Paul the Apostle parish – which made all the difference in what could be accomplished.
“We are grateful to St. Paul the Apostle parish and Father Wilson for their warm hospitality and the use of the parish facilities and church.”
Kim delivered the conference’s first keynote that morning.
A Catholic youth and young adult speaker, Kim has spoken in 50 U.S. states and 16 countries during the past two decades. The husband and father of six resides in Austin, Texas.
Kim recognized struggles that often accompany young adulthood: handling finances, paying off debt and deciding who to befriend, date and marry. Many life aspects are in flux, he said.
“There’s going to be a lot of things that come up in your young adult lives where you’re confronted with that proverbial fork in the road, and you can either wallow in your pain … or you can say, let’s get to work,” he noted. “Is it going to be ‘one day…’ or is it going to be ‘day one’?”
He encouraged attendees to practice gratitude and check their mentality. Individuals can have a victim or victor mentality.
A victim mentality, he explained, is believing everything in life is at odds, a bad set of cards or not fair. A victor mentality is using situations in life and leveraging them for good, he said.
He recommended taking steps to better oneself and be a gift to others. He encouraged young adults to take control of their faith, career, finances and mental health and wellbeing.
“You have to take ownership over your future vocation – whatever that might be – but in all these things,” he encouraged, “God is saying, ‘Take heart – take heart; I am calling you.’
“Here’s the reality guys, let’s not pretend here: Every one of us struggles. Welcome to life.
“If you’re a young adult, that’s literally a feature of young adulthood, is realizing, ‘oh my gosh, my life isn’t perfect,’ and that’s OK. ‘I have issues, I have pain, I have baggage, I have addiction.’”
Kim shared his personal struggle with pornography, an addiction that he overcame through God’s grace. He was first exposed to pornography around age 7 or 8. It became an addiction enduring for more than 10 years.
“My entire adolescence was formed with, essentially, the corruption of my mind, that … I can escape into this world of fantasy, that essentially, this is my drug, and I was dead,” he recalled. “I was dead in sin, and my mind was poisoned by pornography, and one of the profound graces of this moment was that a lifetime worth of sins was washed away in an instant by the blood of Christ.”
Kim began receiving the sacrament of reconciliation immediately after falling into the sin.
A student at the University of California, Los Angeles, he spent time at the Newman Center on campus. He began attending Mass, Adoration and praying the rosary.
His 10+-year addiction was conquered in three months. Kim shared that he has since been sober from pornography for more than 20 years.
He noted that there is great freedom in every encounter with God’s mercy.
Two years into college, he transferred to Franciscan University of Steubenville. He later joined the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, a religious order based in the Bronx, New York.
Kim encouraged young adults to visit a seminary or religious order for a weekend and participate in a come-and-see retreat to experience religious life.
Living in community as a friar, he learned conflict resolution and how to have unpleasant conversations. He was challenged to anticipate the needs of others and not his own.
“It turned out my belly button was not the middle of the universe, surprisingly,” he joked.
Joining the Franciscan Friars was difficult, Kim emphasized. It required courage.
“It was even harder to leave because I felt like, in a way, I was letting God down. When you join seminary, you go in with an idea – and the sisters and the priests and the brothers know – you want to serve the Lord,” he explained. “The whole thing is like, ‘I don’t want to let God down.’”
After discerning out of religious life, Kim later discovered his vocation to marriage. He met his now-wife at a friend’s wedding reception.
He encouraged young adults called to the vocation to marry someone who is aligned in values and goals.
“The end game of your marriage … if you’re called to that, is not so that you’ll be happy,” he reminded the audience.
“It’s so that you will be holy. It’s so that you can help one another and your children get to heaven. You don’t want to be deadlifting, dragging dead weight all the way to heaven.”
In Father Slattery’s keynote, he told young adults to have “main character energy.” He spoke to the audience in a storybook style, addressing them as characters in a video game.
Father Slattery, an Ireland native, holds a doctorate in philosophy. He serves as chaplain at Damascus Catholic Mission Campus and a professor at Franciscan University. He also presents at the Columbus St. Thomas More Newman Center near Ohio State University in Columbus.
Father Slattery encouraged his audience not to be a non-playable character, or NPC.
The term describes a person who acts as a background character in other people’s lives. It is largely used as an insult for individuals who stick to the mainstream and lack individuality or originality.
Speaking to “characters” in the audience, Father Slattery explained that they were going to download “the fix” or “cheat code,” changing from NPCs to individuals with main-character energy who have potential to live significant lives.
“I aim to shatter your default settings, break your algorithm, rewire your brain,” he said. “I’m doing all of this to empower you to live the wildly alive life promised by Him Who once said, ‘I came so they can have real and forever life, more and better than they ever dreamed of’ – max life – John 10:10 – my translation.”
To “rewire” their brains, Father Slattery offered five “hacks.” He said attendees were designed to matter, their mission is non-negotiable and they are creators. They also need to rewrite their character arc and discover their “gold-master” (perfect) self.
God’s revelations in the Bible, he explained, show that each person is designed to be a legendary, one-of-a-kind player in the game of life.
He noted that each person’s DNA and genetics prove that no two people share an exact genetic sequence. Identical twins do not have the same neural wiring patterns.
Each person also has a non-negotiable mission from their Creator to create, love and rescue.
“Forget about finding your life’s purpose like it’s some hidden item you need to loot. It sends you on an endless inward-looking scavenger hunt,” Father Slattery said.
“Mission doesn’t come from inside you. It comes from outside you, from your Designer (God), your Creator, the Designer Who is the great Developer, the Developer of the game you’re playing, the game of life.”
If people believe they do not matter, they fail to offer the world what only they can. Work will be left undone. At the end of time, Father Slattery remarked, everyone will discover the importance of their life.
“That is why there are two last judgments: one after your death, and then, at the end of history, you will discover not only the judgment about yourself but about all of the effects of your life,” he said, “all of the ripple effects that occurred throughout history because of what you did or did not do.”
Father Slattery told young adults they were born to create. Just as God’s primary characteristic in the Bible is Creator, he encouraged creating more than consuming: building, conversing and finding solutions. The human brain, he said, is neurologically wired to be dissatisfied with the status quo.
In rewiring a character arc, he noted that visualizing the future through images wires a brain’s decisions. “Research shows that by the time you’re in your early 20s,” he added, “you’ve already picked the story that defines your identity.”
Finally, everyone must discover their gold-master self, Father Slattery explained, a greater self. A person must become the best version of themselves but not compare to others.
A question-and-answer panel was also offered during the conference. Panelists included Kim, Father Slattery and Sister Loretta DeDomenicis, a Salesian Sister of St. John Bosco who ministers at the St. Thomas More Newman Center.
Attendees submitted questions for panelists to answer. Questions included how to live out the Catholic faith in the workplace, and how to avoid becoming a lukewarm Catholic and having a performance mentality.
The Columbus Catholic Young Adult Conference will return to St. Paul parish next year on Oct. 24, 2026.