Rev. Anna Blaedel is a chaplain, public theologian, writer and a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Religious Studies program. They earned a Masters in Divinity at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. Blaedel has been chaplaining students on the UI campus since 2014.
Affiliated with the United Methodist Church (UMC) for 109 years, the Wesley Center student ministry declared independence in 2022 amid the UMC’s refusal to overturn anti-LGBTQ doctrine — doctrine that brought formal complaints against the center’s executive director, Blaedel, for being an openly queer clergyperson.
In May, the UMC General Conference finally voted to repeal its longtime bans on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage, but only after about one-fourth of UMC churches, opposed to calls for progress and acceptance in recent years, chose to disaffiliate.
Meanwhile, the Iowa City ministry, which has no plans to rejoin UMC, rebrands this month as “sacred collective, a place of belonging for spiritual misfits,” Blaedel shared with Little Village.
“The board is queerer, more trans, younger, less white, more radical and less United Methodist than it was when I began. Sharing in risk, growing together, and loving each other through have become core practices of our community culture.”
Blaedel is also a co-founder and co-director at enfleshed, an organization offering spiritual nourishment for collective liberation, which publishes a free monthly column by Blaedel at enfleshed.com.
Following last month’s historic vote, and just as Blaedel was preparing to defend their dissertation at Drew University in New Jersey, Little Village caught up with the chaplain and soon-to-be doctor of Theological and Philosophical Studies to talk about faith, heresy and liberation.
Take me through your faith journey a bit. Did you grow up in a church?
I was baptized in a small church in a small town in Louisiana, and grew up going to church every week, usually twice. My family moved around a lot when I was a kid, and through all the changes the United Methodist Church was, for most of my life, my primary spiritual home, faith community and place of religious belonging.
When I was in middle school my family moved to Iowa. I was starting to come out to myself as queer, and genderqueer (nonbinary trans language wasn’t yet circulating) and though I struggled to find a place in the conservative youth group, I ended up attending an adult Spiritual Formation Sunday School class that was lifesaving and spiritual-healing. The adults in that class mentored me, listened to me and affirmed me. They taught me to pray with poetry, ask big questions, challenge superficial answers, wrestle with faith and belief, and encounter God as Love.
In college — here at the University of Iowa — I found a spiritual home at the Wesley Center. With the support of Paul and Marsha, beloved campus ministers and mentors, I became a peer minister, and started a Queer Coffeehouse for other LGBTQ+ folks wanting to engage the intersection of queerness and spirituality. I wrote prayers and liturgies, and loved leading small-group conversation.
When I first discerned a call to ordained ministry and headed off to seminary, I was already an out queer. In college, I also fell in love with the academic study of religion. I sought ordination within the UMC, despite its formal prohibition. I wanted to use my position of relative power and access within the denomination to create change from within, as well as draw from the best of the tradition to do my part in bending the world toward justice, and freedom.
How have your understandings of religion, community and justice evolved over your career?
I believe all of us have three core spiritual needs: the need to love and be loved; the need for meaning and direction in life; the need to belong in community.
I’ve become less willing to quietly go along with policies, rules and practices that are unjust, and more willing to speak out, rise up and practice courage. I’ve always, for as long as I can remember, been somewhat of a mystic, and a bit of a heretic.
I have fallen in love with Marguerite Porete, who was part of the beguine movement, a movement of heretics and mystics who were fed up with corruption and hypocrisy in the church, but wildly in love with God and the world. They wrote theology and preached and taught in public spaces. In the late 1200s, Porete wrote a book that was about mystical union with the Divine. Ultimately, she argued that one could experience union with God without the Church, or priests, or sacraments. Bishops and priests weren’t very pleased about her calling into question their authority. They burned her book, publicly, and told her to stop circulating it, and stop publicly preaching. She refused to be silenced. She was imprisoned, charged as a “relapsed heretic.” In 1310, she was burned at the stake in Paris. She carried her book with her to the stake. Her courage, faith and conviction ran so deep.
In 2017, you talked with Little Village about wanting to help students delight in love and ministry — values rooted in the history of Methodism, but which paradoxically required you to break with church law and garner complaints. What was it like living and working in that paradox?
Honestly, it was painful and exhausting and unsustainable. But, as is often the case, it also opened opportunities for transformation and possibilities for connection.
In June of 2016, I rose during a moment of personal privilege and bore witness surrounded by hundreds of United Methodist clergy and laity across Iowa. I claimed my queerness publicly, and used the language that made my queerness, formally, a chargeable offense: “I am a self-avowed, practicing homosexual,” I said. “Or, in my language, I am out, queer, partnered clergy.”
Within an hour, three clergy colleagues, all cis-het white men, none of whom I was in direct relationship with, had filed a formal complaint. They misspelled my name. A week or so later, on my way out of town to attend a writing residency in the hope of finally turning focused attention to this dissertation, I received formal notice of the complaint by the presiding bishop.
Thus began over three years of a wild and intense chapter of life, as a very private, introverted person under very public charge. Tyler Schwaller, the other out, queer clergyperson ordained through the Iowa Conference, would formally become my clergy support person, and eventually my clergy legal counsel. I gave interviews, and accepted invitations to teach, preach and speak in public forums, pulpits and classrooms across the country. I preached at the National Cathedral. I wore my clergy collar while serving as the grand marshal of the local Pride parade.
As the years under complaint accumulated, broader solidarities bloomed, faded and shapeshifted. The movement for queer and trans liberation within the UMC fractured into efforts toward institutional assimilation, acceptability and individual gain. I became too alone, isolated in the onslaught. It took a toll on my health. It was traumatic, and I don’t use that term lightly.
As of this writing, I have lost my place of religious and ecclesial belonging, and am crafting a wilder, more feral form of spiritual belonging in the world. The funding for both sacred collective and enfleshed are precarious, too; together, they just barely afford me enough income to get by. Neither has a future guaranteed beyond the next couple of months; I am learning to live as well as possible within this precarity, which, I am learning, means practicing love, magic and healing with every precious breath.
How does the new break in the UMC over LGBTQ acceptance change that paradigm? What does it mean to you to see those discriminatory rules struck down?
For me, and for so many of my kin, there’s a lot of deep, holy grief, anger and betrayal along with any sense of celebration.
I don’t have words but want to bear witness to truths, like having to see multiple people who have signed complaints against me celebrating it being “a new day!” People who have inflicted so much harm, for so long, against so many of my kin are suddenly allies, draped in rainbows. People who have declared us divisive, disruptive and too radical — turning away, abandoning, abdicating responsibility — are celebrating the fruits of labor they condemned. What will they do to make it right? I believe in transformative justice.
So many have lost so much to make [the vote] possible. So many who have given the most, and lost the most, were not there. Anything that makes life more livable, right now, for queer and trans people is worth celebrating. For this policy change to be worth its salt for queer and trans people, this is where the work must begin, not end.
What role do you think the church should play in Iowa today? When it comes to institutional violence, what can Iowans do to be on the side of justice?
Iowa has a really rich history that’s pretty radical. It’s been devastating to see Iowa move so far right, so fast. But I still believe in the transformative power of being good neighbors.
The first congregation I pastored, right out of seminary, was in Osage, Iowa. We were in many ways strange to each other. But we did the courageous, faithful work of leaning in, with curiosity and care, to learn from our differences. I think of the beautiful people there when rural, white people are homogenized as hateful. I don’t want to dismiss real violence emerging from rising white supremacy, etc. And I received death threats while pastoring there, had people pound on my door in the middle of the night trying to scare and silence me. But I also had people — far more of them, and more often — leaving me extra tomatoes, and teaching me how to garden, and planting flowers, and offering to have my back in the middle of the night if a threat arose.
Whatever power, privilege or position we have, we can find creative ways to use it for collective good. We need to fight like hell for each other.
Religion and expressions of it are highly visible at Palestine solidarity events. What are your thoughts on the coalition of faiths coming together behind the anti-Zionist cause?
Anti-Zionist Jews are mobilizing in such courageous and powerful witness, refusing to be told their tradition can’t hold them, claiming their place. My spiritual and social community includes so many radical Jews, many queer and trans, who have long been on the front lines of mobilizing for racial and economic justice, as well as for a free Palestine.
It was a Jewish activist and poet, Emma Lazarus, who taught us “none of us are free until all of us are free.” As long as Palestinians are facing genocide, occupation and apartheid, none of us are free. As long as antisemitism (actual antisemitism, not what is being sold to quell dissent) is rampant, none of us are free.
Salvation comes from the word salve, for healing. Showing up in solidarity with and for each other, and laboring together for collective liberation are practices of salvation that free us and heal us.
What do you think is the most important thing people can do to strengthen the community this Pride Month?
The rising obsession with enforced obedience to law and order — ecclesial, social or civil/political — scares me so much more than any specific ordination ban, or marriage prohibition. A world in which queer and trans folk have access to what we need for survival and flourishing will remain an utter impossibility as long as policing and militarism reign supreme.
Pride is an invitation, a provocation, to rise up and create holy disruption when urgent change is needed. Yes, I’m talking about Pride, and also the UMC, and also about Palestine.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s June 2024 issue.