David began by bringing a few teens up on stage. He asked them to quickly define these words: to date, dating, seeing each other, and hooking up – according to today’s culture. The answers were quite despairing. Answers included talking about sex, no strings attached, and conditions.

David then asked the teens about the goal of dating. The arena all answered in unison, “marriage”. So, according to our culture, we are supposed to prepare for this sacred union of marriage by a no strings attached and a hook up culture. Really?

The world is constantly disintegrating the ideas of the way of dating and marriage that God has for us. David explained that, “The world doesn’t understand the sacredness of marriage”. So how do we get back God’s idea?

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Kate Rumping will be at both of our conferences this summer. If you are here week one, you will find her volunteering her time as an usher, and if you are here week two you will find her chaperoning the young people in her youth group – Defenders of Christ Youth Ministry from St. Joseph Parish in Imperial, MO – for which she is a core team member. Kate has been attending SteubySTL conferences since 2004, and over the course of these past 15 years she has been a teen participant, young adult, chaperone, and volunteer.

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Kaitlyn from LEAD is a member of St. Joseph Parish in Conway, Arkansas – which is in the Diocese of Little Rock. She will be a senior this fall at Greenbrier High School.

In her testimony this afternoon, she got very vulnerable with all of us about a difficult family situation she experienced, and how she felt a great deal of personal guilt because of how the situation played out.

What brought Kaitlyn a tremendous amount of freedom was opening up with her small group at a Steubenville youth conference.

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After an opening game of Family Feud between the speaking team and a team of teenagers – which the teens dominated, tbh – we spent the rest of this afternoon’s general session focusing on family relationships.

Katie Prejean McGrady began by sharing an awesome story about the birth of her daughter Rose; it’s impossible to summarize in a way that would do it justice, so you might want to give it a listen by clicking on the link above or watching it on our Live Stream.

The moral of Katie’s story is that family life is messy and chaotic and nothing like you’ll ever see in a Hallmark movie. And yet, the great news is that there can be beauty in the messiness.

“God does not call us into isolation, He calls us into relationship.”

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