Casey was born and raised in Ohio and spent almost fifteen years between college and her early career in Cleveland, Tennessee. She has recently relocated to Athens, Georgia with her husband, Wade.

“I was raised in a small Pentecostal church since before I could walk. It was home to the type of Christians who had ‘fire shut up in their bones,’ and I would not trade that church experience for anything in the world. Those folks taught me not only to love God, but also to love the Scriptures, love to pray, and love my neighbor. They were people who knew how to preach the stories of the Bible and how to spend time in the altar (i.e., on the stairs leading up the platform). They taught me to tarry in worship, how to believe God for big things, and how to testify when God came through.

At eighteen I left home for Lee University. The first of any of my family to go to college, I had no idea what I was doing. There I was introduced to academic Biblical studies, Church history, and theology, and as they say, everything changed.

I can’t remember not loving God. I feel as though I came out of the womb this way: interested in the things of God. But college was the first time I had big questions about holy things I previously had assumed or never considered. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why are there discrepancies about the Bible? How is God three and also one? What about people who never hear the Gospel?

It was then also that I found out Christians actually have responses to these inquiries. “Just believe it, that’s faith,” was not what they told me. Learning about my faith, instead of just trying to have it, made my worship so much deeper. 

I could have never dreamed then that I would move on to multiple graduate programs in theology and then return to my alma mater to teach the very classes that changed my own life. For me, there is nothing greater than watching folks deepen their love for God and neighbor by deepening their knowledge. So now that’s what I what I get to do full time– meet with God’s people all over the world and help them love God and the faith.”

-Casey