photograph by jon w. sparks
Elaine Blanchard on the balcony of her apartment overlooking the Memphis Zoo.
Elaine Blanchard doesn’t go looking for trouble, but she doesn’t shy away from it either. And it usually happens that trouble is the one that takes a beating from the diminutive minister, storyteller, nurse, and activist.
She is as peaceful a person as you could want to meet, but at age 70, Blanchard is still fiercely determined in whatever she puts her mind to do.
She is pastor at the Disciples of Christ/First Christian Church in Union City, Tennessee. In January 2019, the congregation voted unanimously to bring her in. So, she commutes from her home in Memphis on Saturday mornings, and comes back Sunday evenings — about two hours’ drive, each way.
It wasn’t an easy start, she says. “When I went there, the local paper, the Messenger, ran a story about me, and the last sentence said, ‘She lives in Memphis with her wife, Anna.’ The backlash from that was just terrible. The members of my church got all kinds of calls: ‘Are you all that desperate to have a pastor that you’ll stoop that low?’ There was much hubbub and the organist left — so we now have this beautiful instrument that we don’t have anybody to play. And two couples left because members of their family said if they kept going to our church, they couldn’t see their grandchildren.”
“On Thursday mornings a whole parade of people in need come to our little church and get their groceries. I find that to be wonderful. It’s a very generous, brave group of people, so I feel lucky to serve them.” — Elaine Blanchard
There was more. The Obion County Ministerial Association saw that article and jumped into action. “They had an emergency meeting to change their bylaws to make it clear that no lesbian or homosexual could join their organization,” says Blanchard. “So, I won’t be joining. I wouldn’t even want to be part of their organization — and those are the ministers, the core of the spiritual community.”
It hurt, but Blanchard says the church has done well despite the cold shoulder and a pandemic.
“Where I serve is a very conservative area, but we have gotten people who have been disenfranchised in other churches and felt unwelcome,” she says. “They have come over to our church and we have grown in the years I’ve been here. I’ve taken in 12 new members. There were about 12 people when I got there, so we’ve pretty much doubled the size.”
And if it’s a fairly small group, it’s also faithful and purposeful. One particular mission is to keep a pantry for the community. “Those 24 people keep a pantry up, and on Thursday mornings a whole parade of people in need come to our little church and get their groceries,” she says. “I find that to be wonderful. It’s a very generous, brave group of people, so I feel lucky to serve them.”
That effort continues a life based on service to the community, and while she’s been hailed for her work, it’s also been a rough ride at times.
Finding Her Way in Memphis
I was a Methodist minister in Lauderdale County,” she says, “but when I came out of the closet, I had to leave the church.” Blanchard then came to Memphis in June 1994 and became part of the First Congregational United Church of Christ (UCC), better known as First Congo, in Cooper-Young. “When I came here it really helped me to make a home in Memphis.”
While she is now pastor of a Disciples of Christ church, the denomination is what she calls a sister organization to UCC. “They have talked about merging for years, but because the Disciples of Christ has communion every Sunday, they just never have been able to get past that,” she says. “UCC doesn’t want to have communion every Sunday and Disciples of Christ doesn’t want to let go of having communion every Sunday. So, it remains two separate denominations.”
She loves both denominations, but divisions great and small are what she works against in her many ministries.
“We seem to think that to be a Christian is to surround ourselves with other people who think like us, spend money like us, drive cars like us, surround ourselves with people like us, and then accuse others of being less than we are. That’s not working for us in terms of Christianity — it’s the opposite of what Jesus came to help us do.” — Elaine Blanchard
“When it comes to faith in Memphis, I wish that we could all get together better,” she declares. “We could do a lot of good if we didn’t argue about things like homosexuality and abortion. And I wish we could get together racially better than we do.”
But she does more than wish. That “activist” label is for real, and she uses her talents where they will do the most good — which is not always easy. Being a minister, though, she has a parable that fits perfectly, one that shows how Jesus sought to get people to shake off their prejudices.
“I think He tried really hard and it really pissed people off asking them to open up,” she says. “The story of the Good Samaritan was that of a Jew who was injured and in a ditch and a Samaritan stopped to help him. The Jew would have seen the Samaritan — an enemy — coming toward him and probably thought he would kill him. But it ended up that the Samaritan was the one who bandaged his wounds.”
And then Blanchard smiles and observes: “People on Facebook have been posting a meme about the measure of one’s Christianity: ‘It isn’t how much you love Jesus — it’s how much you love Judas.’”
She takes it further: “We seem to think that to be a Christian is to surround ourselves with other people who think like us, spend money like us, drive cars like us, surround ourselves with people like us, and then accuse others of being less than we are. That’s not working for us in terms of Christianity — it’s the opposite of what Jesus came to help us do.”
photograph by jon w. sparks
The Storyteller
One of Blanchard’s strengths in connecting with people is through her gift of storytelling. It was something she got into through her work as a registered nurse. “I worked in alcohol and drug treatment, which is what led me to seminary, watching people recover,” she says. “People recover because they get in a circle and they share stories with each other. And people’s lives get turned around. That led me into storytelling and then into seminary and into ministry.”
One of her most celebrated achievements is her Prison Stories initiative, a creative writing and performance program for female inmates in the Shelby County corrections system. “Theater is a great way to reach people,” she says. “That’s why I thought Prison Stories was such a good thing to do because I didn’t want anybody leaving that theater thinking, well, what happened to her couldn’t possibly have happened to me. Because it could have — it just depends on who your mom and daddy are, what part of town you’re from, what color your skin is. Telling stories really opens up dialogue between people.”
Blanchard isn’t doing that any more as the logistics are difficult to keep the prison program going, and she has the church in Union City. But it’s not off the table. “I feel like I’ll want to do prison work again,” she says. “I saw people really begin to see the value and begin to trust each other. I loved that — when they began to realize they’d had that experience too and that it was safe to talk about that here.
Those stories told by the inmates are as authentic as their own lives; very often they involve sexual abuse. Blanchard’s own writing and performances, including two one-woman shows, carry echoes of the inmates’ stories. Her first, For Goodness Sake, is about oppression and redemption.
“In my second one-woman show, titled Skin and Bones, I talked about sexual abuse and sexuality and gender identity,” she says. When it debuted in 2013 with the Voices of the South performance group, it was forthright in confronting people’s obsessions with their bodies. As Blanchard told The Commercial Appeal, “It’s not gender-specific. It’s about any human being coming to realize that this body is the house we’ve been given to live our lives in. Our lives will be as rich and fulfilling as we are willing to care for and trust this body.”
Finding the Good
Blanchard is staunchly pro-Memphis, although her focus is more on the humanity than the things that make up a city. Memphis has certainly felt its share of tragedy and difficulty, which have challenged many people’s faith in the city. But she counsels the idea of looking more closely at where good is being done — and there is plenty to be found.
“Look at things like the pantry at my church, a little group of people serving a whole lot of people,” she says. “Whenever I do volunteer work, like for MIFA or for any organization, you see how people pull together. There’s this long line of volunteers getting things ready for people who need support. That kind of thing really builds my faith. There are a lot of things that aren’t working for us that are troubling, but there are more people being good citizens and helping their neighbor than there are people who are shooting up or destroying things.”
“I tried to make life a little better for them, and in turn, they made life better for me.” — Elaine Blanchard
Blanchard tells a moving personal story of her own crisis of faith. Years ago, she went to her pastor and said she was losing focus. He told her that she should meet another Elaine who was having her own problems.
“[The other] Elaine belonged to an Assembly of God church,” Blanchard says. “She had cancer and it wasn’t getting better. The people at the church were praying for her and decided that she must have some unconfessed sin that was keeping God from healing her. So, they excommunicated her and said, ‘We’re not coming around. We don’t want anything to do with you until you confess all your sins.’ Now, this was a woman who had three little children. She was poor. Her husband left her because she had cancer and the sex was no longer good. He went off with another woman.”
Blanchard befriended the other Elaine and got to know her and her children. “I found Elaine to be just the vitamin that my faith needed because she was not bitter. She said, ‘Well, you know, that’s what they believe.’ She didn’t take it personally. And she died rejoicing in the love of the Lord. I tried to make life a little better for them, and in turn, they made life better for me.”
She Fought the Law
Blanchard is all about healing, resolving differences, bringing people together, working to restore faith and promote goodness.
But don’t cross her.
She gained a bit of notoriety in 2017 when she found herself on, of all things, a blacklist. The list of some 84 people, mostly community organizers and former Memphis city employees, specified that those named individuals would require a police escort if they came to Memphis City Hall. It was not clear in every case why some of them had earned the dubious distinction.
It was an alarming action, which resulted in a lawsuit. It was also absurd, which resulted in a fair bit of humor. Blanchard told the Memphis Flyer that she was surprised to find herself on such a roster.
“Mayor Strickland has put my name on a list of persons who are not permitted into Memphis City Hall without an escort,” she told Micaela Watts, writing for the Flyer. “Wow! This grammie is a gangsta!” The lawsuit — Blanchard v. City of Memphis — resulted in the Memphis Police Department having to change how it surveilled people who were exercising their First Amendment rights.
Not that a little list would ever stop a determined Elaine Blanchard.
