There is the other list, of more than 50 funerals and memorial services for students, parents, grandparents, and faculty. Taken together, they sketch the outline of someone special who has been present, again and again, for the moments in people's lives when they needed someone they trust.

What makes that presence remarkable is that he made that choice twice.

Steve Allen arrived at Lovett in 1995, fresh from Yale Divinity School and a short stint as an associate pastor in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, ready to serve as Middle School Chaplain. He became Head Chaplain in 1997, then Head of the Religion Department, and for six years, he helped shape what spiritual life at the school could look like. Then, in 2001, he left. A good opportunity had come, the Head Chaplain position at Westminster College in Pennsylvania, and he took it. By any reasonable measure, his Lovett chapter was over.

But he came back in 2003.

It's the kind of decision that doesn't make obvious sense on paper, which is probably why it reveals so much about him. Westminster was a fine institution. His career was moving. But something about Lovett had gotten into him, some sense of what the place was and what it could still become, and he couldn't quite let it go. So he returned, took up his post again, and got back to work.

What followed was more than two decades of building. In 2004, he introduced the Closing Chapel Senior Walk after seeing something similar at another school and believing Lovett was ready for it. That same fall, he launched the Opening Chapel Procession, which went through a few iterations before arriving at its current form: seniors and kindergartners entering together, the oldest and youngest members of the school community, walking side by side. He started the Senior Chapel, where graduating seniors plan and lead their own final service. In 2012, he launched a student-led Bible Study program. In 2014, he began taking students to Israel for a summer religion and history course that grew so popular it became, effectively, a senior tradition before transitioning to Greece in 2024.

But the more durable things he built are harder to put on a list. They are the habits of presence: the Thursday morning Fellowship meetings he advised for his entire tenure, the Vestry Retreats he kept running even during the COVID-19 pandemic when they moved to the football field on a Saturday, the wrestling practices he has attended since 1995, first alongside Jim Glasser and then alongside Billy Maldonado, coaching boys through the particular discipline of a sport that asks everything of you and gives back in ways that have nothing to do with trophies.

"I have loved coaching," Allen reflected, "not just for the wins and state championships, but for the relationships formed and friendships made." He watched his two sons become all-state wrestlers on that same mat, remarking that "they were both a whole lot better wrestlers than I was," and then stuck with it, long after he could have reasonably stopped.

Steve Allen has been a witness to the Lovett community in the truest sense of the word: not a passive observer, but someone who shows up, pays attention, and stays. 

He has stood at the front of chapels for the first days of school and the last. He has stood at the front of sanctuaries for the happiest days of alumni’s lives and the most devastating. He built the traditions that current students experience as timeless, unaware that someone had to invent them.

In 2025, the Board of Trustees recognized his contribution with the Founder's Award, the school's highest honor. In his current role as Chaplain Emeritus, he launched Lovett Alumni Expeditions, extending his decades of transformative travel to the school's broader community of families and alumni. He is, characteristically, still building.

"My mission," he said, "is to create spaces where everyone can find spiritual grounding and connection again." The word again implies that people, for valid reasons, lose their footing, drift, and need somewhere to return to. Steve Allen has spent 30 years making sure Lovett is a place they return to. He would know better than most what it means to leave and find your way back.