But here’s one family that embraces those principles all year long, though they will be the first to tell you that’s not done easily or without an occasional glitch.
“We do not do that perfectly,” Elizabeth Koproski said with a laugh.
Her husband Steve nodded: “We blow it a lot, but we keep trying. And we’re grateful we had a rescuer who went to bat for us.”
Steve — a former tight end on the Kent State football team — is the national director of the campus ministry of Athletes in Action. The Xenia-based organization works with athletes and their spirituality on 225 campuses across America, including nearly every college in the Miami Valley.
Elizabeth — a former high school swimmer from Toledo and club water polo player and sorority girl at Bowling Green — has been a campus representative for Cru Ministries, under whose auspices Athletes in Action falls.
After working a decade on three college campuses in New York City and at the University of Dayton, she now leads conferences of the Lenses Institute, which helps Athletes in Action staffers better understand and act in the ethnically and culturally diverse world they minister.
The couple lives in an old house in Dayton’s Oregon District with their three children — Olivia, Quinn and Turner — who are every bit the typical grade school students and, then again, they are not.
They have gone with their parents on sports tours/mission trips to East Asia and Puerto Rico.
They’ve spent a couple of summers living in Los Angeles as their parents worked with after-school programs and with the homeless in various inner-city neighborhoods, including the Nickerson Gardens public housing project in Watts, birthplace of the Bounty Hunter Bloods, and at Ramona Gardens, a mostly Latino project in Boyle Heights, which has notorious gangs connected to the Mexican Mafia.
Steve and Elizabeth also have brought their kids along in their Dayton involvements, be it befriending an Iraqi family that fled here to avoid ISIS, which had targeted the husband who had been an interpreter for Americans, or attending Sunday services at the MarketPlace Movement, a nondenominational Christian ministry on West Third Street in Dayton.
And then there’s the River’s Edge Montessori School in Dayton that the kids attend and where Elizabeth is involved in the Voices of River’s Edge, a group that connects American families with the several refugee and immigrant families who have students at the school.
Why add all this to the boys’ soccer practices and Olivia’s gymnastics?
“We just want our kids to appreciate and celebrate the distinctiveness of different cultures and different socio-economic backgrounds,” Steve said.
The other day I sat with the couple at their kitchen table and talked to them about everything from Steve’s football and Elizabeth’s cancer battle five years ago to the day-to-day practice of their faith.
“I figure we’re here to love Jesus, love our family and love the city God put us in,” Elizabeth said as she referenced Acts 1:8 and the passage “You shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
As they each added parts to their story, I wondered what initially had attracted the one-time football player whose nose shows signs of being broken and the sorority girl who has had a longtime love with New York City.
Elizabeth offered a thoughtful answer about how, when she first met him, he was working with several people and showed himself to be a leader, someone who treated everyone equally and continually “built people up with kind words.”
And you Steve?
“She’s pretty good lookin,’ ” he grinned.
‘Something missing’
Born in Toledo and raised from his teen years in Ashtabula, Steve ended up in a Kent State football program that was going through some inauspicious times in the early 1990s.
“It was a character-building experience,” he said with a laugh. “We won just five games in five years.”
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Early in his career he said he already felt “a little bit of something was missing.”
He wasn’t talking about Saturday afternoon victories, but life in general.
He told of the team’s senior captain, Ray Carroscia — who later became a well-known football coach at Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy — coming to his freshman dorm room to chat with his roommate:
“They were talking about Jesus like he was a real person in their lives, not like Napoleon or Julius Caesar or some guy from history. He was providing them with this love and personal strength and wisdom. That was all new to me.”
Intrigued, Steve joined other football players in Bible study and after graduation joined Cru in the summer of 1995 and soon branched off into Athletes in Action.
His first assignment was to minister athletes on the Ohio State campus and at nearby Central State and Wilberforce universities.
“I grew up a Michigan fan,” he admitted.
“Oooh…don’t print that,” a laughing Elizabeth chimed in.
Steve shrugged: “I had wanted to go to UCLA, but they sent me to Ohio State. But I’ll tell you, after six months I became a Buckeyes fan and today I still am.
“So that was my second conversion.”
‘The world comes to cities’
Elizabeth’s biggest test came in January 2011 when she was diagnosed with Stage III ovarian cancer. Six months earlier her mother had died.
“That was really a rough stretch,” she said quietly.
She had three young children then and a daunting diagnosis. In turn, she said she had a good doctor at the Women’s Cancer Center of Kettering — Dr. Thomas Reid — and a strong faith that was first born prior to her senior year in college.
“I knew who Jesus was and what he had did for me, but I kinda put it on the back burner in college and jumped into the party life, the fun life,” she said.
Then came her 21st birthday and too much celebration, she said:
“I was sick in bed for days. I just remember lying there thinking I’ve got two paths I can go on.”
She said she reflected back to her Sunday school teachings as a kid and that helped her redirect her life. Soon after, she ended up in Campus Crusade (now called Cru), alongside some other sorority girls and several athletes from the various Bowling Green sports programs.
After graduation, like Steve, she joined Cru in 1995 and soon was ministering at three New York City schools: NYU, Cooper Union and Hunter College.
“One thing about New York,” she smiled. “There are a lot of ideas and people love to talk.
“That’s what I love about cities and why we live in downtown Dayton now. I feel like the world comes to cities.”
By 2000, she was on a mission trip to East Asia.
She and Steve don’t mention the name of the country because it doesn’t want missionaries there.
“Just say a large, closed country in Asia,” Steve shrugged.
That’s where the couple finally met and their romance began. Three years later they married. And they’ve been back to Asia four more times, sometimes taking squads of athletes on tours to play against local teams.
Yet all that ministering of others didn’t make it any easier when Elizabeth heard the word “cancer.”
“I think sometimes Christians will put up a front and say I’ve got faith, I’m not afraid,” she said.
“One of the things I realized is that I can really believe in Jesus and have anxiety and depression…and cancer, too. He doesn’t necessarily spare us from all those emotions and things.”
She survived and last spring she got the five-year “cancer free” bill of health.
Crossing cultures
After her health struggle, she redirected her work and now is focused on the Lenses Initiative.
“We’re trying to address a problem we have in the ministry of not always being great cultural learners and crossing cultures,” she admitted.
“We’re primarily a white organization, but our outreach is to people of all different ethnicities and backgrounds.
“So I help lead our Lenses conferences. We put all our staff through five-day sessions where we talk about things like white privilege and the blindness we all have of entering into the lives of people who are different from us.”
They do five conferences a year in places like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta, Lexington, Ky., and Raleigh, N.C.
“We had one of our conferences here in Dayton,” she said. “They said, ‘Oh we could have it right out at the Athletes in Action complex in Xenia, there are dorms and all kinds of facilities,’ but I said, ‘No, I want it in downtown Dayton.’
“I hear some people say they are afraid to come to downtown Dayton, so I wanted to show that you guys have no idea of the awesomeness that’s in Dayton. I want you to experience it.”
She said the national visitors stayed in the Oregon District at a bed and breakfast and a nearby inn and had a tremendous experience.
“One of the things that makes Dayton so special to me is that of all the places in the world, a lot of people from different countries are coming here,” she said. “I think it is a great upward move for the city.”
She mentioned that the Apex Community Church her family attends on Far Hills Avenue has a regular service for people from Nepal.
Then there is Grace UMC Church on Salem Avenue that has a weekly service in Swahili for the some 75 refugees from Congo who attend. Today, the Grace congregation and the Congolese worshipers will join together in one service and sing Christmas songs in both languages.
And at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Xenia Avenue, the Spanish Mass packs the place every Sunday afternoon.
“To be honest, I think now that I work with people from all over the world — people who are different than me — I’m seeing Jesus more clearly now than I ever have,” Elizabeth said.
“I think when we stay with people who are always like us and see the world the same way — even politically — you get a smaller view of God. And you realize you might have been wrong about some things. Other people can give you a fuller view of who He is.”
As she thought about all the turns her life and Steve’s and the family’s have taken thanks to sports and faith, she remembered back to her sorority days at BGSU.
“I just thought Christians were boring, kind of nerdy and didn’t really do much,” she laughed. “But my eyes have really been opened. You can love Jesus and be a world changer and really have some fun, too.”
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