A Seventh-day Adventist student missionary from Southern Adventist University in Collegedale was found murdered on Wednesday on the Pacific island of Yap, the Adventist News Network said.
Kirsten Elisabeth Wolcott was teaching at an Adventist school on the island and was the victim of an apparent homicide away from the school's campus, church officials said.
Ms. Wolcott, who is originally from Virginia, had reportedly gone jogging by herself before morning classes and did not return, church leaders said.
The 20-year-old Ms. Wolcott had taken a year off of school at Southern Adventist University, where she was a junior education major.
Church leaders from the church's regional administrative headquarters, the Guam-Micronesia Mission, took the one-hour commercial flight from Guam to Yap Wednesday evening to assess the tragedy affecting the school and provide grief support for other teachers.
Police have been notified and an investigation has begun, church leaders reported.
"This is devastating news, not only for the family but for the school and the Adventist Church," said Homer Trecartin, associate secretary for the Adventist world church and director of Adventist Volunteer Service.
"Throughout the history of the church many have made the sacrifice to go serve and some have paid with their lives," Mr. Trecartin said. "Our prayer is that God will raise other people to finish the work that Kirsten and others started."
Southern University will hold a memorial service the week after Thanksgiving break, a university spokesperson said.
Yap SDA School opened in 1987 as an elementary school and subsequently expanded to a kindergarten through 12th-grade school. The school is highly rated on the island and is run mostly by Adventist college students volunteering as teachers. About 10 student missionaries are serving this year in Yap, Trecartin said. Teachers live in apartments on campus.
Yap, about 16 miles long and four miles wide, is one of four island states of the nation of Micronesia, a U.S. protectorate.
The Adventist Church currently has more than 780 student missionaries serving around the globe, Trecartin said.