In Nashville, Vesper Club is creating a space for young adults to build friendships and community without having to choose between their faith and a social life.
Suits and ties mingled with long dresses as several hundred young adults gathered on a Nashville rooftop for “Gatsby at Golden Hour,” an event hosted by a new initiative aimed at bringing young Catholics together.
Music from a DJ filled the venue as guests drifted between the indoor and outdoor spaces, stopping to talk along the way. The party was supposed to end at a certain hour, but 40 minutes later, people were still there. They weren’t in much of a hurry to call it a night.
For Patrick McFarland, 24, and Davide Thompson, 22, the young entrepreneurs behind Vesper Club, the scene represented what they had hoped to create: a place where Catholic young adults could enjoy a lively social life while meeting people who shared their values.
The two met at the University of Notre Dame and moved to Nashville in June, launching Vesper Club that same month. They had found opportunities to attend Bible studies and parish activities, but something was missing from their social lives.
“Growing up, you have university, you have high school, middle school, you have sports teams, clubs,” McFarland told the Register. “You have all this support structure to give you that window to meet people who are like-minded to you.”
After college, those built-in opportunities begin to disappear.
Even while attending parish activities, they felt something was missing from their social lives, especially on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. The usual nightlife scene didn’t reflect their values, but they still wanted to go out and meet people.
“We still wanted to have fun, laugh with friends, be able to dance to music, be able to meet people who are like-minded to us,” McFarland said.
They wanted to bring the two together: the music and venues they enjoyed, and the community they found through their Catholic faith.
“The secular world has rooftops, and the parish has the right people and the right foundation,” McFarland said. “But we thought if we put those two together, then people wouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other.”
The idea has found an audience. According to McFarland and Thompson, Vesper Club drew about 150 people to its first event and has since grown to more than 1,500 members within five months. Along with its Gatsby-themed and disco signature events, the group — named for the Church’s traditional evening prayer — holds a weekly Run Club and meetups after Mass.
McFarland and Thompson start their signature events with prayer, but they see Vesper Club as different than a typical parish event. It is a place where young Catholics can meet outside church and, hopefully, become friends.
“We’ve seen that some parish events can feel a bit forced, or that the staff organizing it doesn’t really know what young people want,” Thompson said. “We’re for young adults by young adults, and we want to create a space that feels organic and natural.”
‘It Feels More Intentional’
The need for such spaces extends beyond Nashville. In its “Loneliness in America 2025” report, The Cigna Group, a global health services company, found that 67% of Gen Z respondents identified as lonely, compared with 65% of millennials and 44% of baby boomers. Religious services and community activities, it found, are among the ways people can connect with others.
At Vesper Club events, organizers give guests a little help getting started: Each person receives an icebreaker card with questions to answer. Prompts range from where guests are from and where they’ve traveled to more personal questions about virtues and vices. Later in the evening, the cards are shuffled and handed out again, and guests have to find the person whose answers they received.
“We don’t do name tags,” McFarland said, describing the club’s effort to avoid “LinkedIn energy” — the formal, transactional feel of a typical networking event.
Evelyn Hurh, 23, a nursing master’s student at Vanderbilt University, knows what it’s like to arrive without knowing anyone. She moved to Nashville in January and was looking for a way to build a community of people who shared her Catholic faith and values.
She first heard about Vesper Club through an invitation she received at a coffee shop across from the church she attended after Mass. The idea of an in-person gathering immediately appealed to her.
“It was really cool because I was like, ‘Wow, it’s something that’s real life, not on a screen,’” she recalled.
Hurh attended the first event alone. She found the cards gave people something to talk about beyond the typical small talk at parish gatherings.
“It kind of opens up the door for real conversation,” she said. “It feels more intentional.”
Hurh has since attended each signature event, as well as the weekly run club. Having moved to Nashville knowing few people, she noted that Vesper Club has helped her start building a community of her own.
Caleb Maiocco, 29, who works in finance and has lived in Nashville for three and a half years, had attended other Catholic young adult events before discovering Vesper Club. He sees Vesper Club as offering the kind of social events young adults enjoy, with their Catholic faith as part of the experience.
“Having those actually be more Catholic-focused has been a great spot to merge those two things,” he said.
For Maiocco, one of the draws is that there’s always another opportunity to see people on a regular basis, whether at run club, after Mass or at a party.
“Most people for their first event … come alone,” he said. “But after they meet people and they actually create a friend group who they pull up with, which is super fun to see.”
A Sense of Community
Vesper Club is not alone in emphasizing fellowship as a way to bring Catholics together. Frassati Fellowship, with chapters in cities including New York and Washington, organizes activities such as hiking, outdoor adventures, dinners and social gatherings. Catholic Beer Club, founded in 2014, also brings Catholics together in an informal setting.
Derek Roush helped start the Catholic Beer Club’s second chapter in Kansas City after he and two friends from Benedictine College launched the original in Denver. After enjoying a conversation over drinks at a brewery, they decided to invite more people to join them the next time they met.
Catholic Beer Club now has chapters in more than 20 cities, with Roush describing its approach as “no agendas, just community and relationship.”
Vesper Club’s founders are seeing interest in bringing that approach to other places, too.
McFarland and Thompson have received direct messages through Vesper Club’s Instagram page from people across the U.S. interested in finding that sense of community and starting chapters in their own cities, as well as from people as far away as Barcelona and Turkey. They’re now figuring out which cities to focus on first and hope to work with local ambassadors to get each group started within the coming months.
For Roush, the value of those gatherings is clear. He recalled one man who seemed uncomfortable at one event and spent much of the evening talking with him. When the man came back a few months later, he had a group of friends of his own.
