Joyce Meyer
(1943-?)
born in 1943 in south St. Louis as Pauline Joyce Hutchison.
Meyer also claims to have heard God call her name while travelling to work one morning in 1976 while praying intensively. She had been born-again when she was nine years old, but her misery pushed her to go further in her faith. She claims she was “drunk with the Spirit of God” that night at the local bowling alley after returning home from a beauty appointment “full of liquid love” later that day.
Meyer was a member of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod’s Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in St. Louis for a short time. She became the church’s assistant pastor after only a few years.
She resigned as associate pastor in 1985 and started her own ministry, which she named “Life in the Word” at the time. Her husband, recommended they start a television ministry in 1993. Her show, now named Enjoying Everyday Life, first aired on Chicago’s WGN-TV and Black Entertainment Television (BET) and is still on the air today.
Meyer’s programming was dropped by KNLC, a Christian television station in St. Louis run by the Rev. Larry Rice of New Life Evangelistic Center, in 2004. Meyer’s “excessive lifestyle” and teachings often going “beyond Scripture,” according to Rice, a longtime Meyer admirer, were the driving forces behind the program’s cancellation.