Called to Serve: The Steady Faith and Public Work of Jackie Nophlin
“As a Christian, I’m called to be more concerned about the common good than individual rights, privileges, or praises.”
Jackie Nophlin said it in a calm, even voice, the way she says most things. No theatrics. No sermon swell. Just a sentence shaped by years of living it out. And if you ask her what to call her, she’ll tell you simply, “Just Jackie to my colleagues.”
In Bristol, people know her in different ways. Some know her as Reverend Jackie, the steady presence at Household of Faith Community Church. Some know her from hospital rooms and family visits where prayers are offered without fanfare. Some know her from public meetings where she listens closely and speaks carefully. And some know her from the rise of land at Citizens Cemetery, where history rests under grass and brush and somebody had to care enough to bring it back into view.
That somebody turned out to be her.
Citizens Cemetery has stood on the north edge of Bristol since before 1865. More than fourteen hundred documented burials lie there, along with many more unmarked graves. For years the place sat quiet and overgrown, the kind of ground people passed without realizing the stories beneath it.
In 2020 a group of community leaders reorganized into a nonprofit determined to reclaim it. Volunteers arrived with tools and patience. Nophlin was there too, directing, organizing, encouraging, steady as a fencepost. Hundreds of volunteer hours later, stones began to emerge from the brush. Names returned. Pathways opened. The past started speaking again.
At the entrance now stands a historic marker honoring Robert Clark, lynched in 1891. It was placed there as part of a national effort to acknowledge painful chapters of American history. It stands because people decided remembrance matters.
The work continues. Nearly eighty percent of the cemetery is still uncleared. The organization has partnered with researchers from East Tennessee State University using ground-penetrating radar and other tools to locate graves without disturbing them. It is careful work that demands patience, coordination, and trust. The kind of work that suits Nophlin.
Her own life has required that same kind of endurance. Jackie is a survivor of domestic violence that lasted nearly two decades. She speaks about it plainly, without self-pity and without drama. Her former husband struggled with alcoholism, and what abuse she endured left her paralyzed and using a wheelchair. She does not introduce herself with that history. But she does not hide it either. It is part of the road she traveled, and those who know her say it deepened her empathy and sharpened her sense of purpose.
“Since 2000,” she says, “I’ve lived determined never again to be trampled, overlooked, or mistreated because of who and what I am. I’m not afraid to be a voice for those who are afraid.”
At her church she has spent decades helping neighbors through housing struggles, illness, and financial strain. She has also served as president of the Bristol Area Ministerial Alliance, a role that requires steady judgment and the ability to bring different voices together without raising the temperature in the room.
People who have worked with her describe a pattern. She listens first. She studies the issue. Then she speaks once, usually with a solution that has already taken everyone into account.
Her civic involvement stretches well beyond church walls. She attends public meetings, reviews proposals, and talks with residents about how decisions made downtown ripple outward into neighborhoods. Not from a distance. From inside the lives affected by them.
What stands out is not volume. It is steadiness.
In an era when public life often rewards whoever talks loudest, Jackie Nophlin has built her reputation on something quieter and harder to manufacture. Consistency. The same tone in private conversation that she uses in public. The same concern for one struggling resident that she shows for an entire community project.
The cemetery group she helps lead chose a motto that fits her approach to life: Love All Serve All. It sounds simple. It is not. It requires patience, humility, and a willingness to stay long after attention fades.
That has been Jackie Nophlin’s habit for years. She shows up. She does the work. She keeps going.
In Bristol, people tend to notice that kind of record.
The current City Council members are in the process of selecting a replacement for a council member who took another job.