Dr. W. Chad Stephens (Chad) died on April 14, 2025, surrounded by his large, noisy and adoring family of six children and nine grandchildren and his loving wife of 44 years. Chad lived – even thrived – through a three-and-a-half-year battle with cancer, still working up to the weekend he died. He passed into eternity with all the peace and dignity he brought to every day of his life-and with his starched blue Oxford-cloth shirt fully buttoned.
He was the oldest of three children born to Paula Bley Stephens and Wayland Stephens in Lubbock, Texas. With his family he moved to New York, Florida, Denver, and other places. At age 14, he won a Reader’s Digest scholarship to attend boarding school on Long Island.
At 17, he enrolled at Davidson College, his spiritual and intellectual birthplace, and discovered the wonder and power of lifelong friendships with nerds who had imaginations to match his own. At 24, Chad graduated from Duke Medical School, then promptly departed to practice in rural Congo.
He met Jane Thompson at a church picnic in Durham in 1981. She had just returned from two years of teaching high school in Kenya and was working on her PhD in English at the University of North Carolina. After their first date, he told his roommate that he had met the woman he hoped to marry. He got his wish on September 12, 1981. Chad and Jane adventured together for 44 years.
Later that year, Chad moved to Winston-Salem and began a residency in Family Practice at Wake Forest University’s Baptist Hospital. He completed two more residencies there: Gerontology in 1988 and Psychiatry in 1999. He added Addiction Medicine as a subspecialty shortly thereafter.
Chad loved his work. He loved everything about medicine, its learning and its practice. He maintained his ten-year Board Certification in three different areas: Behavioral Medicine, Alcohol & Substance Abuse, and Family Practice. He took the Family Practice Board Exam two years into Stage Four cancer. He loved music, languages, poetry, birdwatching, motorcycles, uncomfortable travel to remote places, and qualifying exams.
In 1985, Chad and Jane moved to Kenya to serve as a medical missionary and an English teacher. In 1989, they moved back to Winston-Salem. Then in 1993, they moved back to Kenya. When the Rwandan genocide erupted in 1994, Chad and a surgeon friend flew to a remote airstrip in eastern Congo on the Rwandan border then helped establish a refugee camp in Rutare, Rwanda.
Chad returned home to his family in Kenya even more quiet than before, stunned by the brutality of war, yet awed by the power of community health workers. The experience entrenched his sense of justice and his commitments to service and public health. He brought those commitments home to Winston-Salem and helped bring together leaders from Forsyth and Baptist hospitals to open a clinic for underserved people in Forsyth County.
Though Chad was quiet, he built a home full of noise and possibility. Dozens of amazing students and young adults lived with his family over the years, including many Imendes, Hollands, Cooks, Kugurus, Pipers and more. One of these chosen children, Katie Holland, called home one day to tell Jane and Chad about the amazing work of New Life Homes in Kenya– and Chad and Jane began the Amani Children’s Foundation.
The Stephens’ work with Amani and New Life Homes has helped over 2,600 infants receive medical care and find loving families. In 1999, Chad and Jane took their family back to Kenya and were blessed to love, then adopt, two beautiful children, Joe and Julie (Bui). The joy of bringing Joe and Julie back with their four older children – Sam, John, Rob, and Kate – was the defining experience of the Stephens family.
Two outstanding churches in Winston-Salem nurtured Chad’s family. In 1981, they joined First Presbyterian Church, where they formed lifelong friendships and Chad served on the Missions Committee. In 2001, Chad and Jane joined Emmanuel Baptist Church, under the leadership of Rev. Dr. John Mendez. Chad was honored to be a devoted member of the Trustee Board.
Chad and Rev. Mendez traveled the world studying psychoanalysis, enjoying opera, studying ways to understand historic and immediate trauma, and building a lifelong friendship. From very different places, they came together with a passion for healing the person and the world.
In 2015, Chad was inducted as a member of the Distinguished National Fellows of the American Psychiatry Association. In 2025, Chad received the Distinguished Physician’s Award from the Novant Founders’ Society in recognition of excellence in patient care. Chad was so delighted on that day, just a few weeks before he passed, that his prodigious capacity for humility slipped for a moment-and he showed the award to his wife, who promptly sent it to everyone she knew.
Chad is survived by Jane Stephens, his wife of 44 years; his six children, Sam (Gyssela), John, Rob (Hershey), Kate, Joe (Aliyah), and Julie; and his eight grandchildren, Alex and Andres Rodriquez, and Aiden, MJ, Chad Jeremiah, Charlie, Alan, and Madison; his father Wayland, sister Shawn and brother Kirk and a host of nephews, nieces, in-laws and chosen family.
Chad’s family invites all who loved him and his family to celebrate a life of love, service, quiet devotion, faith, and courage on Saturday, April 26, at Emmanuel Baptist Church, 1075 Shalimar Drive, Winston-Salem, NC 27107. Family visitation will begin at 11 a.m., and the service at 12 p.m.,
Memorial contributions may be made to the Amani Children’s Foundation online at www.amanichildren.org or by sending a check to Amani, 525 Hedgewood Place, Winston-Salem, NC 27104, or by Venmo to @Jane-Stephens-AmaniChildren.