The bouncy synth beat of Chappell Roan’s dance-pop anthem “Hot to Go!” was blasting. Everywhere Lexi Seals-Johnson looked, adults in ball gowns, tailored tuxes and slinky silk dresses belted out the song’s raunchy lyrics as they worked the dance floor.
Billed as a spring fling, the Holladay event, Seals-Johnson realized, had evolved into a kind of joyful exorcism.
The goal had been to create a chance for those raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to “reclaim” prom from the strictures of the religion of their youth. And the 150 or so attendees hadn’t held back.
There were strapless dresses, femme-presenting guests in suits and queer couples all around. Oh, and the music? Only unedited versions of songs, thanks.
“People were jumping and dancing and spinning,” Seals-Johnson recalled, “and all very free.”
Hosting the May event was the Lost & Found Club, an organization she had helped form along with her friend Chelsea Homer to foster community among former Latter-day Saints like themselves.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Lexi Seals-Johnson, left, and Chelsea Homer named fundraising as one of their biggest challenges. Both regularly spend 40-hour weeks on the nonprofit — work for which they're not compensated
The two women stepped away from the church at different points in their lives — Seals-Johnson when she was still in high school and Homer after she was married with kids. But both, as adults, had found themselves craving the community church afforded.
“I just remember one night sitting in bed next to my husband,” said Homer, who was neither fully in nor out of the church at the time, “and thinking ‘I need friends.’”
She started small, an Instagram post asking if any others wanted to come over and eat pizza and talk about their faith journeys with her. Twenty women showed. In terms of beliefs, they ranged from fully out of the church to participating but questioning.
Park meetups followed. So did a pandemic, which shifted the community entirely online. The Facebook group Homer, who fully broke with the church in 2019, had originally started to organize gatherings swelled to 10,000 users from across the country. But, if anything, COVID-19 only reinforced Homer’s hankering for in-person community.
“There’s so much value,” she said, “in just seeing other people physically [and being] like ‘Oh, I’m not alone in this.’”
In 2021, she joined with Seals-Johnson, a friend she had made through her efforts, and together they filed the papers for a nonprofit.
“I was just [trying] to create an environment of safety and consent,” Homer, who lives in Murray, said, “and a place where people can show up as themselves.” That includes people who are still in the church but don’t feel entirely at home in it, or people who have never been affiliated with the faith. Their only rule for attendees: Be respectful.
The decision to shift the group offline was jarringly out of step with the direction of a world that had, in the wake of the lockdown, grown even more online, with virtual communities in many cases supplanting physical ones in the lives of Americans, regardless of religion.
Perhaps that is exactly what has made the organization so successful. These days, the Lost & Found Club holds two to four in-person meetups a month that draw an average of 15 to 300 attendees, depending on the event, from as far south as Provo to as far north as Kaysville.
There are game nights, book clubs, bingo, speaker events and “Bridgerton” watch parties. There are classes, too, on everything from cocktail making and bar basics to financial literacy. Some gatherings are for families; others adults only.
(Chelsea Homer) Members of the Lost & Found Club gather for an outdoor viewing of "Bridgerton."
Additional events are open only to women and gender queer individuals. This includes “Reclaiming Girls Camp,” which the group hosted for the second year in a row this summer for those looking to relive the Latter-day Saint sleepaway program for Young Women — only this time as adults and with the freedom to wear tank tops. Around 250 attended this year’s gathering, which included skits, “reclamation workshops” and a musical performance by the formerly Latter-day Saint musician Mindy Gledhill.
Sensitive to the fact that not everyone who would want to join in the camaraderie lives in Utah (Seals-Johnson has lived in Portland, Oregon, since 2022 and often flies in for gatherings), the group provides livestreams when it can and, yes, hosts the occasional virtual event. The last online meetup, held in January, attracted more than 200 attendees from across the country.
Homer and Seals-Johnson aren’t paid, despite both regularly spending close to 40-hour weeks on the effort, and rely on fundraising and donations to keep the program running.
“Everything,” Seals-Johnson said, “is much more expensive than people think that it is.”
Other issues have arisen, too, in the form of questions of power sharing, leadership and what it means to be an equitable organization.
“The truth of it is we came from a very patriarchal structure‚” Homer said, referring to their former faith. “And that patriarchy, the internalized misogyny doesn’t leave just because we’re farther away from a chapel.”
Still, the work remains very much worth it for both women, who agreed their favorite part is watching people exchange phone numbers at the end of an event.
Just last month, the group held an adult kickball game.
“The kids were cheering their parents on,” Homer said, “and it was one of those moments…that feels like an out-of-body experience. It just feels so validating.”
Homer said she gets texts all the time from out-of-staters sending her pictures of their brunch meetups or dinner parties.
“Those messages,” she said, her tone almost wistful, “are the most rewarding aspects of this.”
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