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Eld. Glenn B. Grisham

A longtime Pentecostal preacher, Eld. Glenn B. Grisham of Lebanon, died at the age of 92 at 11:50 p.m. Saturday evening December 17, 2022 at the Quality Care Center for Rehabilitation and Healing in Lebanon with his family around him.

Funeral services from the Ligon & Bobo Funeral Home, 241 West Main Street in Lebanon, are scheduled to be conducted Wednesday morning December 21, 2022 at 11 a.m. Eld. Roger Grisham and Steve Enoch will officiate and his niece, Carolyn Grisham Butler will sing, and burial will follow in the Cedar Grove Cemetery.  The Grisham family will receive friends on Tuesday from 3 p.m. until 7 p.m. and on Wednesday after 10 a.m. at Ligon and Bobo.

Born Glenn B. Grisham on January 19, 1930 in Smith County, he was one of five children born to the late Melvin B. Grisham who died February 14, 1991 at the age of 87 and Alma Doin Proffitt Grisham who died April 17, 1986 at the age of 78.

His first wife of sixty two years, Doris Winfree Grisham preceded him in death on July 28, 2014 at the age of 82, and two brothers, Omer High Grisham who died at the age of 84 on December 15, 2009 and Joe Alex Grisham who died at the age of 84 on September 23, 2020.

In the past few years, Glenn loved visiting the place where his family had lived years ago (the place where the old Jonesboro community once was) and Hogan’s Creek, where he lived as a little boy.

He grew up helping his father in the years when his mother was ill.  At 22, he married Doris Winfree, and at 24, served in the Army during the Korean Conflict in the 48th Engineer Topographic Battalion.  They left the military and moved to Cookeville, although for several years, they still attended “the church under the bridge” in Carthage with their two children.

Those years were filled with family because all of them – brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles – went to that same church and on Sunday afternoons, ate big dinners at his parents’ house with family while their children played in the yard.  In the summer, he and the other men in the group liked to squat in the back yard in a circle eating watermelon.

He became a master electrician and retired from TVA after twenty seven years, and was a member of #429 IBEW.  In his late twenties, answered his heart’s call when he and Doris became ministers in their Pentecostal faith.  He was ordained in September 1961.  Over the years, they pastored churches in Smithville, McMinnville, Murfreesboro and Shelbyville, and founded and built a church in Mulberry Valley in Lynchburg.  During his ministry, he conducted fifty nine funerals, seventeen weddings, and baptized one hundred fifty people in Jesus name in church pools, rivers, and creeks.

In one Tennessee County, he was asked by several families to hold church there every Saturday night.  It was on that ridge where a lady sent for him to help her, and when he got to the place he was needed, he found her sons and their acquaintances in a gunfight.  It ended in prayer after he got them to put down their guns.

Glenn and Doris preached on street corners and in radio stations.  They became church planters in different states, especially Oklahoma, where they held services in an old building on a Seminole reservation.  In those small churches, they met people whom they came to know and love people who needed help and God.  He prayed every night beside his bed with his wife and, until they grew up and moved away, his children.

Glenn loved his children and grandchildren.  They all remember one fact about him: every time they visited, he started for the kitchen, asking what he could fix them to eat.  And he told nothing more often to others than stories about his great grandchildren visiting him.

When Doris died, he gave up the church they had built in Murfreesboro and grieved.  Eventually he married an old friend on December 5, 2015, Violet Sandlin, who went with him when he occasionally preached and took care of him as he passed through his eighties and began his nineties.

Surviving is his wife, Violet Bruce Sandlin Grisham; two children, Lisa (Lee) Brown of Baxter and Eric L. (Darlene) Grisham of Mt. Juliet; four grandchildren: Autumn Welch of Baxter, Dakota (Jesse) Johnson of Cookeville, Kaitlin (Josh) Hawk of Mt. Juliet and Bransford Grisham of Mufreesboro; seven great grandchildren: Carter and Dalton Welch, Payton, Maddux, and Etta Rose Johnson, and Tyler and Bailey Hawk; two sisters, Ruth Grisham Givens of South Carthage and Elizabeth “Libby” Grisham Thomas and husband Billy of the Turkey Creek Community.

His family will always remember things about Glenn Grisham: he was a good man.  He believed in Jesus and wanted to live the right way.  Going to meetings, singing hand clapping gospel songs, and doing what is right were his joy.  His family and his friends are blessed by his life.

LIGON & BOBO of LEBANON

Messages for the Family

  1. Brenda Cumby says:
    God be with you Lisa, Autumn, and Dakota and all the rest of his large lovely family.