Carol Anne Eby, 92, of Nashville, Tennessee, passed away 15 October 2026. She was a retired missionary who served for 27 years in Papua New Guinea.
Carol Anne was born on 24 September 1934 in Mount Olivet, Kentucky, to Reuben and Marie (Insko) Asbury. She was an only child, and the spelling of her name was inspired by her mother’s love for Anne of Green Gables, but to her father she was always known as Andy.
Carol Anne’s father gave up teaching to become a sheep buyer at the Cincinnati Stockyards. As a teenager, Carol Anne also got a job there as a clerk. She graduated from Hebron High School as a salutatorian in 1952.
She attended Trevecca Nazarene College in Nashville, Tennessee. She has described those years as some of the happiest of her life—she joined clubs, planned programs and parties, decorated for banquets, had a busy social life, and on occasion dreamt up pranks to frustrate her professors.
As president of the senior class, Carol Anne helped organize an event where the girls asked the guys out, herself vowing to ask the first guy who walked out of the men’s dorm. That guy turned out to be sophomore Lee Eby—and the rest is history.
After graduating from Trevecca, Carol Anne pursued her master’s degree at George Peabody College, now the School of Education at Vanderbilt University. Lee Eby and Carol Anne Asbury were married the day Lee graduated from Trevecca on 10 June 1958.
The newlyweds moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where Lee attended Nazarene Theological Seminary and Carol Anne taught at Pitcher Junior High for three years. Lee graduated in 1961, the same year their first son was born. After seminary, the young couple moved to Arlington, Texas, where Lee would pastor for the next two years.
Called to be missionaries, both Lee and Carol Anne had applied to the Department of World Missions. Soon they were heading to the Territory of Papua and New Guinea in the Southwest Pacific as missionaries for the Church of the Nazarene, with a 21-month-old son, Mark, and a 3-month-old daughter, Lee Ann.
Their assignment on the mission field was to establish a Bible school to train indigenous pastors. They settled among the Tungei people of the North Waghi Valley. Seeing the education needs among the local community, Carol Anne started teaching kindergarten at the local school. She taught the children to read in Melanesian Pidgin, in addition to Bible classes, health, nutrition, child-care and cooking. Carol and Lee had two more children, born in the highlands of New Guinea: Tim in 1966 and Melanie in 1968. During her 20-year tenure as a missionary, Carol Anne was equally devoted to nurturing a home where her family could thrive.
Carol Anne continued to teach and run the publications department until the Eby family returned to the USA in 1981. Her patience, kindness, and legacy of teaching helped prepare the leaders of the church and the country that she came to love and call home.
With children going to college and Carol Anne’s mother and her eldest son needing more support in the US, the Eby family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1982.
Carol Anne joined Trevecca’s English department as a professor, serving there for 18 years, during which the school transitioned into a university. She was the sponsor of the Mission Club and supported the CAUSE initiative seeking to inspire the next generation of Nazarenes to be engaged with missions. She took student groups to Belize, Venezuela, and Brazil.
In addition to teaching, Carol Anne was an accomplished writer who published five books with the Nazarene Publishing House and edited numerous writing projects.
Carol Anne Was preceded in death by her husband, Lee, who passed away in 2022. She is survived by her four children: Mark Eby, Lee Ann Dekker, Timothy Ray Eby, and Melanie Marie Eby; 10 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren.
This was an abbreviated and adapted version of the family’s obituary. To view the full version, click here.