A pioneering faith leader who refused to compromise her identity or her beliefs, Jeanne Knepper was the first openly gay woman to be ordained and appointed within the Oregon-Idaho Conference of the United Methodist Church.
Jeanne Knepper 鈥�69
March 7, 2025.
A pioneering faith leader who refused to compromise her identity or her beliefs, Jeanne Knepper was the first openly gay woman to be ordained and appointed within the Oregon-Idaho Conference of the United Methodist Church. She dedicated her life to inclusivity, seeking connection with conviction.
“She was good at calling people out, but she wanted to build bridges,” says the retired Reverend Marcia Hauer, Jeanne’s wife. “‘I’m not going to back down.’ That was her whole attitude toward life.”
Born in 1947, Jeanne earned a bachelor of arts in physics at Reed, writing her thesis on acceleration-dependent radiation terms with advising from Professor Dennis Hoffman [physics 1959–90]. She paid her way by taking two work-study jobs, one in the infirmary and one in the library.
“I did not tell the two places that I had a job, because I think there was a limit that you weren’t supposed to have more than 15 hours,” Jeanne recalled in 2019. “And I had a 15-hour job with each place.”
During her Reed years, Jeanne could often be found in the bookstore, where she sought not only a sense of belonging, but a sense of self. “When I was at Reed, I haunted the bookstore looking for a book someplace that would connect with me and tell me who I was or how I fit into the world,” she said.
Jeanne’s journey to self-acceptance was marked by struggle. “I cried,” she told The Oregonian in 2012. “I studied. I prayed. I wrote in my journal. It was all a dynamic process. As the church was moving to the right, I was moving the opposite direction.”
In 1982, while Jeanne was still in seminary, she was elected to what was then known as a probationary membership in the United Methodist Church. A decade later, the Board of Ordained Ministry’s recommendation to the Oregon-Idaho Conference Clergy Session that she receive an appointment was defeated, but the Judicial Council of the UMC ruled in her favor in 1993.
“We were a very different conference back then,” said the Reverend Daryl Blanksma, a retired member of the conference’s Queer Clergy Caucus. “Up until 2016, we (queer clergy) were mostly in the closet and it was mostly just Jeanne out there.”
Jeanne, who served at Shalom Ministries and Portland University Park UMC, was finally ordained an elder in Oregon-Idaho in 1996. Striving to find common ground, she showed kindness even to those who condemned her—including a peer in the church whom she suggested read Acts 10, in which Peter has a vision of God calling upon him to welcome a Gentile into the Christian community.
“My mom was immovable,” Jeanne’s daughter, Andrea Knepper, said in a eulogy. “She was extraordinarily stubborn. She won every argument she had—whether or not she was right!”
Throughout Jeanne’s life, her determination manifested in memorable and surprising ways, whether she was defending her siblings from a local bully or punching a young man from a fraternity who had insulted Mrs. Buckler, an elderly neighbor. “Mom told me that violence wasn’t the answer to problems, and turned herself into the police,” Andrea said. “She got the fraternity shut down; Mrs. Buckler no longer had loud men singing obscenities on her front lawn.”
During General Conference 2024, Knepper and Hauer celebrated at home as LGBTQIA+ restrictions were removed from the Book of Discipline. “It’s like you’ve lived watching black-and-white TV for your whole life and suddenly we are in living color and it’s wonderful,” Knepper said at the time. “Oh, it’s a glorious day, but it cannot be spoken without that underlay of so much dedication and determination through pain.”
Since Jeanne’s retirement in 2012, her impact upon the church has endured. “I want her to be remembered for what she did for the conference,” says Hauer. “This was a very homophobic annual conference. We became a reconciling annual conference in 1996 thanks in large part to Jeanne.”
Jeanne is survived by Marcia and two daughters, Andrea Knepper and Laura Bowman
Appeared in Reed magazine: Winter 2025
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