The Rev. Karl Kopp, who died Oct. 4 in Centennial at age 71, revitalized the flagship of the First Church of Divine Science when he took over more than 20 years ago, filling once-vacant pews with congregants who came for the poetry readings, concerts, art shows, performances and lectures, and returned for the Sunday sermons.
With an angular, tall physique that suggested his past as an amateur basketball player, Kopp possessed an affable, self-effacing demeanor that conferred confidence in his listeners.
Kopp never allowed anyone or anything to be taken for granted. When he lived in the Southeastern United States, each spring he routinely pulled his car over to carry turtles in mid-road to safety.
“When anyone else says, ‘We had only 80 people today,’ I say, ‘Great! We had that many?”‘ Kopp said in a 1984 Denver Post interview published shortly after he assumed the helm of the Denver church.
“We can’t give in to disappointment.”
As a boy, Kopp attended church sporadically. His father, Hal Kopp, the football coach who revitalized Brigham Youth University’s team in the 1950s by teaching players the forward pass, rarely felt compelled to attend services.
As a teenager, Kopp began attending churches that offered youth basketball leagues, drawn as much by the games as by the spiritual message.
His churchgoing lapsed during his undergraduate studies at Yale University and his postgraduate years at the University of California at Berkeley.
When he was drafted, Kopp wrote “agnostic” on his dog tags.
During his Army service in Japan, Kopp learned Japanese, mastering the complicated nuances of Japanese suffixes and prefixes that can wildly alter a sentence’s subject and meaning.
When he served as an English professor at the American University of Beirut and the American University in Cairo, Kopp learned to speak Arabic.
In Lebanon, he also learned, inadvertently, about life under siege.
Following the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli jets routinely buzzed Beirut. Blackouts and curfews were enforced. Kopp, like all Americans in Beirut, constantly risked being arrested as a spy. Yet his most treasured memory of that time involved a railroad traffic jam.
As the train rattled along, impatient drivers swerved into the oncoming lane and both shoulders.
Finally the train passed, revealing that drivers on the other side of the tracks had done the same thing. The impasse backed up traffic for miles on both sides.
“For almost an hour, the horns blew, fists waved, fights broke out, with shouting matches in Arabic and in almost every Middle Eastern tongue,” Kopp recalled in a 1987 essay for the Denver Post.
“But after a while, the insanity of it all – the human comedy – was clear to everyone. … Some people began dancing on top of the cars, and then others danced through and along the lines of cars and trucks as far as we could see. We all got out, we all sang, we all laughed at ourselves, and we all danced.”
When Kopp returned to the U.S., his first marriage ended. He moved to New Mexico with his second wife, Jane Kopp. They began Red Earth Press, a publishing house that turned out anthologies of poetry, short stories and essays.
The Kopps became interested in the First Church of Divine Science after taking a meditation class taught by a church member.
Both eventually became ministers and firm adherents of the denomination’s tenet that daily prayer and practice in discerning God in life, love and substance “results in man’s right attitude toward negative thinking,” as the church founders put it.
Kopp drew newcomers to his church by staging popular poetry workshops, lectures and plays. Speakers included Jungian Marian Woodman, and controversial former Dominican priest Matthew Fox.
Some writing seminars at the church and elsewhere – Kopp was among the playwrights featured at the 2004 Arvada Center’s Playwrights Showcase – featured Kopp himself.
He was the author of several poetry books, editor of several anthologies of Southwestern literature and a dozen plays, including “Infernal Witness,” a dramatic biography of poet William Blake produced at The Bug Theater in 2001.
Kopp and his congregation took pride in being known as an artists’ church and, because of its eclectic classes, what some members call “the church that is also a university.”
Kopp’s final projects included affiliating with the Brooks Center for Spirituality, which is co-sponsoring a showcase of original works by local and regional playwrights in February.
Survivors include his wife of 36 years, Jane Kopp of Denver; daughter Roxanna Smith of Boulder; son Zachary Kopp of Denver; and two grandchildren.
A service will be held at 2 p.m. Oct. 29 at the First Divine Science Church, 1400 Williams St., to which the family suggests memorial contributions in Kopp’s name.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
