Weekly Email: March 9, 2026

Weekly Email

Mar 9

This past Friday, late in the afternoon, we lost a pillar of the Southern Seminary community and, more specifically, our online learning department. Kathy Savage, who has served at Southern for over twenty-five years, most of that as the administrative assistant for our department, passed away unexpectedly.

I want to take this week's email to tell you about her, because so much of what you experience as an online student at Southern has its roots in the example Kathy set. For over two decades, she set the standard for how we care for students. If you've ever felt seen, known, or genuinely cared for as a student at Southern, that standard traces back to Kathy.

I first met Kathy in 2013. I had just been hired as a research assistant for about ten hours a week in the online learning department. I still felt pretty new at Southern and was a little over a year into my MDiv. I had a friend I recently made, Dustin Bruce, recommended I get a job in online learning. He thought I'd like it and that it would be a good way to get integrated with the school and get to know some people.

I remember sitting down at one of the typical desks we have at Southern Seminary, right across from Kathy. That was my first introduction to her. I still distinctly remember the warmth and joy she carried thirteen years ago. And that warmth, that joy, that care I felt all those years ago is the same experience anyone who came in contact with Kathy would describe. She was an absolute joyous person. She loved the Lord. She loved her husband. She loved her kids. She loved Southern Seminary. And most of all, she absolutely loved our distance students.

I remember one of the first weeks I had started working, she brought several large jars of clearance Peter Pan peanut butter from the store. I didn't know what to do. I was in my second year of marraige. We didn't have a lot of money. I was in a new job in a new space that I didn't know. And Kathy brought me jar upon jar of Peter Pan peanut butter. I remember thinking, what in the world am I going to do with all of this? But that was Kathy. Paul tells us to consider others as more important than ourselves and Kathy didn't need that reminder. It was just the way she lived. She was always putting others above herself, always thinking about the people around her.

Over the years, I always loved sitting down with Kathy to hear stories of students she had corresponded with. Back then, we were a small online department. We had a director and a couple of other positions, but Kathy was there before I was, when it was still called distance education. She communicated with our distance students day in and day out, helping them. She was there when we were sending out CDs to students with the lectures. There was a lot of correspondence. Our online program was geared for missionaries to receive theological education on the mission field. It wasn't anywhere close to what we do now.

But Kathy always had a heart for students. She had a heart for the church. Isaiah writes, "How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the herald, who proclaims peace, who brings news of good things, who proclaims salvation." Kathy wanted to see that gospel proclaimed to the ends of the earth, and her mission in life was to serve these students and see them thrive in their calling. She understood that her work behind a desk in Louisville was connected to gospel proclamation around the world. She felt it.

Kathy was also a prayer warrior. I'm sure you have those people in your church, the ones you can count on to be praying day in and day out for every situation going on. Paul tells us to pray constantly and I never met anyone who embodied that more naturally than Kathy. It was just a natural outflow of who she was. She would consistently bring up conversations she'd had with students, telling us what they shared, asking how we could be praying. One of the first things I learned in my time in the online department was that kind of deep, prayerful care for students all around the world.

In the office, Kathy served so many years. She would often think of herself as a kind of a mother figure, a home away from home for people studying here in Louisville in a new location and working in the online department. She was always thinking about the seminary students working in the department, making sure they had everything they needed, making sure they felt welcome. She took care of so many of us. She listened to our stories. She had so much joy when any of us had kids, got married, or moved away.

Paul told the Galatians to serve one another through love and Kathy lived that out in the smallest details. For example, she absolutely loved birthdays. For every single person's birthday in the department, for as long as I can remember, she kept a list of birthdays and took the initiative to pass around a card so people could write handwritten notes, or, for a time setup a Google Jamboard where we would write notes of encouragement. She would bring in food, put together a spread, and make sure the team stopped to celebrate. Even as the department continued to grow, she wanted every person individually to feel special and known and cared for. That was Kathy. Always thinking through how to serve others, how to make them feel seen.

Kathy was also such a personal encouragement to me and so many others throughout the years. She was there through many hard seasons, through the loss of my grandma, through years of infertility, and through the joy of bringing our son home through adoption. She never forgot the details of what was going on. She was always following up, always asking, always praying. When Paul writes about rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep, he is describing Kathy. She taught me so much about an outlook on life that is rooted in the gospel, rooted in the joy we can have in Christ even when times are extremely hard. She didn't teach that through words or advice. She taught it through years of example.

As I reflect back to our last annual review this past January, I think about the two of us talking and reminiscing. She and I were among the few who had been around through all these years and she had been here longer than I had. We talked about students who had worked in the department and moved on, different people who had come and gone. She always had such a fond, joyous memory of each one.

Kathy was a wonderful, wonderful woman. Her life was characterized by joy in the gospel and by the hope she found in Christ. She felt others' pain. She prayed with them and listened to them. She had that wonderful laugh and smile in the office.

So much of Southern's story over the past twenty-five-plus years, especially when we think about online education, cannot be told without Kathy. She was here through it all, serving faithfully, and never complaining. She is one of those people you look at and think, I want my life to be marked by that kind of joy in Christ. "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." Kathy did all three, every single day.

I write this with a heavy heart. Kathy will be missed. The online department will never be the same and will be forever indebted to the joy and care she brought. Thankfully, we know that she is now with Jesus. Her joy and the love and happiness she brought to everyone she came in contact with was unmatched. And because of the hope we have in Christ, we know the joy she is experiencing now is greater still.

As you go through this week, please be praying for her husband Tony, her family, and the Southern Seminary community. "The LORD is near the brokenhearted; he saves those crushed in spirit" (Psalm 34:18). Hold on to that this week.

I'll be back with you next week in a more normal format.

Brian