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Stephanie Summers

Summers-Stephanie.jpg“The CCO has completely shaped the way I engage the world,” says Stephanie Summers. “The ministry opened up my understanding of the connectedness of what I was doing in the classroom to what God wanted in the world, and that has translated into how I live my life today. Literally, how an entire day functions has a deliberateness about it that is shaped by my Christian worldview. It’s about where God wants his people to go and the part I have to play in that.”

Stephanie first encountered the CCO’s ministry on her second day as a student at Kenyon College. “I remember lying in bed on my first night at Kenyon and thinking to myself, ‘I can be anyone I want to be.’ I had just started taking my faith seriously before college, but now that I was away from home, I realized that I could leave that all behind and do whatever I wanted to do.”

The next day, Stephanie met two fellow first-year students who were both excited about “this Kenyon Christian Fellowship thing. These two women and I spent time praying that evening about what our college life would be like, and I remember lying in bed later and saying to God, ‘OK, you got me.’”

She met the CCO staff workers, Byron and Jen Pryor, and got to know other students involved. “I couldn’t figure out why these people were hanging out together when people out there needed Jesus,” she remembers. “I was more interested in spending time with the radical feminists on campus.” She did end up co-leading a women’s Bible study with Jen Pryor, and she helped organize prayer groups and attended retreats and the Jubilee conference. And as she approached graduation, Byron suggested she consider joining CCO staff, which had never occurred to her. It ended up being a great fit, and she worked for the CCO for 12 years, on campus and in organizational leadership.

Today, Stephanie and her husband, Jason, a fellow Kenyon grad, live in Washington, DC, where Stephanie serves as Chief Operating Officer for the Center for Public Justice. “Because I worked for the CCO, I have an immensely better understanding of the big worldview questions that people have,” she says. “When it comes to something as abstract and historically demonized or mishandled by the church as our political lives, I come from a perspective that inherently believes that God wants our whole lives—including our political lives—under his lordship. The Center for Public Justice is about educating believers in this truth, and that’s something that being a student and a CCO staff person taught me.”

Stephanie and Jason are also active members of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, through which they reach out to their community. “I remember a very explicit and clear exhortation during college that the Christian fellowship on campus was not meant to replace church,” Stephanie says. “I would not have become a life-long church member if not for the CCO.” She gets up at 6am every Sunday morning to go down the street to her church to make breakfast for homeless men and women. “I do that because the context of my job often keeps me completely isolated from that part of the world around me.”

Ultimately, how Stephanie lives her life today is built on the foundation laid for her as a college student. “If I hadn’t encountered the CCO’s ministry, everything would have been different. I would have been the seed that fell on the rocky soil. It was literally the difference between life and death. It offered me a door into a different place, and I still had my hand on that other door.”