Kathleen Grant

Honoring more than two decades of music, ministry, and service at the Russellville Seventh-day Adventist Church.

September 2026

On September 12, 2026, Kathleen Grant’s final Sabbath at the Russellville Seventh-day Adventist Church, something happened that seemed almost too fitting to be coincidence.

The organ quit working.

After more than two decades of Kathleen sitting at its keys, much of it alongside pianist Kimberlee Mealy, the old Hammond organ began giving out on the very Sabbath Kathleen was preparing to say goodbye.

Kathleen took it in stride.

“I just thought the Lord made it wait until I got to finish on it,” she said.

Perhaps there could be no more appropriate ending to a chapter that began many years before Kathleen ever came to Russellville.

Kathleen’s relationship with the Hammond organ began when she was only nine years old. Every day after school, she practiced for an hour, with her mother making sure she stayed at the instrument for the full time.

By age 12, she was playing a Hammond model similar to the one she would eventually find waiting at the Russellville church. During summers away at camp, whenever an organist was needed, Kathleen found herself at the keys.

But from about age 16 until she came to Russellville, opportunities to play were few.

Then she walked into a church with a Hammond organ that no one was playing.

Once church members discovered that Kathleen knew how to play it, a ministry that had been quiet for many years began again.

“I was still really bashful about playing in front of people, especially by myself,” she remembers. Playing alongside Kimberlee gave her confidence, and together their music became a familiar part of Sabbath worship.

Kathleen estimates that she played the organ at Russellville for at least 21 years.

For her, it was never simply about providing music.

“It was a service that I could do to the Lord,” she said, “and God had blessed me and prepared me to do that.”

She knew the music mattered because on the rare Sabbaths when illness, surgery, or another circumstance kept her from playing, people noticed.

“They would come up to me and tell me they really missed it,” she recalled. “I’m so happy that it blessed others.”

One hymn has remained especially close to her heart through the years: “In the Garden.”

Kathleen came to this part of Arkansas around 2000 for a nursing position at Chambers Hospital. She initially attended the Seventh-day Adventist church in Plainview before eventually making her way to Russellville around 2005.

Some of the first people she remembers were Marilyn Schmehl, Shirley Hudson and Myra Turnipseed.

What struck Kathleen immediately was their warmth.

She began attending regularly and, after about a year, finally approached Pastor Don Turnipseed herself about becoming a member.

The timing was significant. Kathleen was going through a difficult period personally, was relatively new to the area, and didn’t have a large circle of people around her.

The congregation became much more than the place she attended on Sabbath.

“My church family just gave me a reason to keep on going,” she said. “I didn’t really know anybody out here, and I just had a really hard time in my personal life. They were my family. The church was my family.”

That church family also became a powerful source of prayer and support during some of Kathleen’s most difficult health crises. Seventeen years ago, she survived a near-fatal automobile accident, and through that experience—and other seasons of ill health—she remembers the church as a praying force in her healing.

Nearly two decades later, that has not changed.

When asked what the Russellville church means to her today, Kathleen answered simply:

Music was only one expression of a much larger pattern in Kathleen’s life: caring for people.

Kathleen spent 38 years as a registered nurse, working in an unusually broad range of settings. Her career included nursing homes, cardiac care, orthopedics, psychiatric nursing, post-surgical care and work associated with the opening of a neonatal intensive care unit.

At one point, she had even been preparing for medical school. But with two children to raise, Kathleen made a different decision.

“I thought, I think I’d rather be a mother and use my skills in nursing.”

She did exactly that.

Kathleen’s commitment to health ministry also took her far beyond Arkansas. Serving in the mission field had long been on her “bucket list,” and after retiring, she decided she wanted to go while she was still able. When she learned about an opportunity in Panama, she began preparing—learning Spanish and obtaining her passport.

For five months, Kathleen served as a medical missionary in the mountainous jungles of Panama near the Costa Rican border. There, she taught cooking, exercise and principles of healthful living, checked blood pressures and blood sugars, offered natural-remedy guidance, and traveled mountain pathways to visit people in their homes.

Life in the mission field was far from comfortable. Kathleen remembers an outdoor kitchen, freezing-cold water for bathing, a bat that took up residence in her bedroom, a cat that slept at the foot of her bed, and Poncho—a mischievous monkey who would race to find an egg whenever he heard a hen cackle.

Near the end of her time there, Kathleen became seriously ill after drinking unboiled water. In an unexpected reversal, the people she had come to serve became her caregivers, tending to her with their own remedies until she was well enough to return home.

The experience became one of the most adventurous—and humbling—chapters of her life, and one she still hopes to write about someday from the journals she kept during that time.

And in Kathleen’s life, nursing, music and ministry were never entirely separate.

She remembers singing to patients, including those nearing the end of life, hoping to bring them peace.

“It was part of my ministry,” she said, “to bring some peace and happiness to everybody.”

That same desire to serve followed her into church life.

Kathleen’s interest in serving others has never been limited by geography.

She finished high school in Austria and traveled in Italy and Germany while living abroad. German—her father’s mother tongue—became a language she needed in daily life, while her plans for a future in medicine had her studying Latin well enough to translate the orations of Cicero. Years later, Spanish would become useful during her medical missionary work in Panama.

Her interest in other countries also became closely connected with her faith. Kathleen followed the countries highlighted through the church’s Thirteenth Sabbath mission offerings, researching the people, places and mission work taking place around the world.

For several years, that interest drew her particularly toward mission work in India, where she supported an orphan. After moving to this area, she supported a ministry in Benin, Africa, for many years and watched with gratitude as that work grew and bore fruit.

For Kathleen, learning about another part of the world was never simply about geography. It was often about discovering where people were being served—and how she might have a part in helping them.

Those who know Kathleen primarily from seeing her at the organ may not realize just how many other corners of church life bear traces of her service.

She also gave her time to children who wanted to learn music, offering piano lessons and sharing the gift that had been part of her own life since childhood.

For years, she taught children and helped care for them during evangelistic meetings so their parents could participate. She attended training events with Myra Turnipseed and Nora J. Woolley Judd to become a better children’s teacher, traveling together to places such as Camp Yorktown Bay.

Some of the children Kathleen once taught when they were only three or four years old are now graduating from college.

She also remembers joining Myra and Nora in responding to a devastating tornado in the Clarksville area. They slept on Army cots in a church basement while helping distribute food and supplies.

The scenes outside stayed with her—families whose homes had been destroyed gathered along the roadside, trying to cook food and keep warm.

There were health ministries, cooking classes and other outreach efforts as well. Kathleen took courses in vegan cooking and frequently brought dishes she prepared to church.

Cooking, she says, became another way of serving others.

Taken together, these memories paint a picture of church life that Kathleen remembers as remarkably active—members worshiping together, certainly, but also teaching children, feeding families, responding to disasters, learning together and caring for their community.

Kathleen and her husband, Wayne, are now moving to the Cabot area to be closer to his children and grandchildren.

She is looking forward to strengthening those family relationships and hopes that her faith will speak through the way she lives.

“I want them to see that part of Jesus in me,” she said, “and see that there is a difference.”

And although she is leaving Russellville, Kathleen is not leaving music behind.

She has already purchased a portable organ for her new home and knows exactly where she plans to put it. She hopes to play in the mornings—and if her new church needs someone to play, she intends to make herself available.

“I just want to see what needs there are, where I could be of service.”

Perhaps that sentence says as much about Kathleen as anything else.

For more than two decades at Russellville, she found places where she could be of service—and quietly filled them.

At the organ.

In the children’s classroom.

In the kitchen.

Beside people whose lives had been torn apart by disaster.

And through countless Sabbaths of music that became such a familiar part of worship that people noticed when it was not there.

When asked what she would like to say to the Russellville church family before leaving, Kathleen did not need many words.

“They’re all dear, dear to my heart,” she said. “And I will surely miss everybody.”

Kathleen, you are dear to ours as well.

The old Hammond may have chosen your final Sabbath to fall silent, but the ministry that came through its keys—and through the woman who sat behind them for all those years—will remain part of our church story.

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