Marie Esper Meyer 

From a small Indiana town came a colossal voice of love and compassion for all people. Marie Lois Esper Meyer was a strong, gentle woman who devoted herself to social justice, equality, and spiritual and environmental health for the world. Born the eldest of three siblings in Cleveland, Ohio, Marie graduated from Anderson College in Anderson, Indiana majoring in Christian Education in 1945. It was there that she met her soul mate and beloved husband of forty-nine years, Louis “Pete” Meyer. Together they walked a path of goodness and compassion. Marie was a Christian, an activist, a pastor’s wife, a devoted mother and grandmother, a writer, an organizer, and an inspiration to all of the many lives she touched. 

As the National Associate Secretary of the Women of the Church of God (WCG) for thirty years, she worked tirelessly to advance the physical and spiritual lives of others. Marie believed that we are all people of God. She supported desegregation, civil rights, and fairness for women. Her passion for others was manifested in many ways. In the 1960s Marie developed the WCG DARE project, which encouraged women to DARE to form a personal friendship with a woman of a different race or economic status. Within days of the project’s launch, 1600 women wrote back accepting the challenge and subsequently many heartwarming stories and friendships came forth. Marie dared to live a life true to her convictions. In 1975, Marie initiated funding for the Church of God’s World Hunger project, which continues to raise money to feed the hungry to this day. In the 1970s, she traveled to Southeast Asia with a group of women participating in Christian Causeways to promote efforts for world peace and to exchange viewpoints. In the 1980s, Marie traveled to eastern Africa to learn how women in those developing lands lived and what could be done to benefit them. She returned to develop programs that increased awareness and involvement of women in issues of social concern in the world. She promoted understanding of issues involving refugees, immigrants, poverty, women, racism, literacy, environment, voting rights, justice, and peace. Marie was a board member of League of Women Voters, Community Action Council, and her church. She volunteered in her community in various capacities and was active in Grandmothers for Peace and the SMART program. 

Marie had a wonderful, wry sense of humor and a ready smile. She was devoted to her family and friends, whom she loved deeply. She enjoyed quiet, serene, thoughtful moments and created them many times for her family. She would read a passage aloud from one of her books, make everyone a cup of tea after a sumptuous meal she had prepared, draw attention to the snow on the trees outside the kitchen window and the subtle shades of color in the sunset, ask her granddaughters to play one of their new solos—creating idyllic moments in a chaotic world.

In her quiet, loving ways, Marie stood above the crowd in both her thinking and her moral insights. In the areas of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and economic justice, Marie was thinking in the right direction long before many of us had even begun to understand the issues. Her keen mind and perceptive reactions to enormous questions of the day helped those around her to stretch their understanding and tolerance. A genuinely loving and sincerely tolerant woman, she unceasingly and courageously called attention to the important issues and plights of others rather than to herself. Marie Meyer was truly a visionary ahead of her times and a heroine to all who were privileged to know her.