GRAVETTE -- The new pastor of the Gravette and Sulphur Springs United Methodist churches drives over from Centerton to serve his congregations; but after living in the big city, he says that's just like driving from one side of town to the other.
Eric Meyer is an Illinois native. He was born in Lake Forest, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, and attended high school in St. Charles. He spent most of his life in large cities but says he is enjoying his time now in a spot where there are more wide-open spaces.
Meyer came into the ministry only recently. In fact, the Gravette-Sulphur Springs charge is his first appointment. He is a student at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Okla., working on a Master of Divinity degree, and expects to graduate next May. He has been a full-time seminary student until now and will drive to Tulsa for one class this fall and one in the spring to complete his coursework.
Meyer's college work was at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, where he received a bachelor's degree in marketing in 1989. He was hired by a Minnesota toy manufacturing firm right after college and moved to Minneapolis, where he spent the next 15 years as a toy salesman. He became a partner in the firm after five years, with Target as his main customer, and ran a sales organization that sold products in 15 states and represented over 30 companies.
Even though he was quite successful in his sales career, Meyer decided that the many nights on the road away from his wife and four children were harmful to his family life. In 2001 he accepted an offer to run a sales team for one of his vendors and moved to Dubuque, Iowa. Dubuque is only an hour's drive from Cedar Rapids, where his wife Brenda's family lives.
The Meyers spent the next few years living in Dubuque. Then, in 2005, Eric was asked to take on the Walmart account and the family moved to Bentonville and he became Walmart's local vendor. He was teaching Taekwondo during that time and asked his instructor about the possibility of opening a second school that he could run. Instead, he was offered the chance to become a partner in the current school in Centerton. He accepted and he and his partner developed a really close relationship. They introduced a Christian emphasis into the school and told the students that it was through God that they received the power for all their activities.
"I invited God into that school and we taught from the perspective that God was guiding everything we did," Eric said. "At first, my partner was afraid that praying during the classes would scare away students. However, we found that they relished exercise and worship." After a few years the school had grown enough that there were many students who could take over his teaching duties.
Working as a toy salesman was a way to make a living but Meyer said it wasn't really fulfilling. He thought something was missing and felt called to do something else with his life. "I was searching," he said, so he enrolled in the Master of Ministry program at John Brown University in Siloam Springs. He spent a year at JBU and went halfway through the coursework there before enrolling in Phillips Seminary in January, 2011.
Meyer preached his first sermon in the local churches July 6. Although this is his first full-time pastorate, he has already been ministering in other areas. He began a ministry called Senior Services at First United Methodist Church in Bentonville that helps senior citizens maintain their homes. About 20 volunteers help seniors, mostly widows, by doing a variety of chores to clean, refurbish and rebuild their homes. Eric has also been a benevolence counselor and managed FUMC Bentonville's weekly community meals.
Meyer met his wife Brenda in college. They adopted their oldest son, Garrett, from an orphanage in Russia when he was only 18 months old. Garrett, now 19, graduated from Bentonville High School this year and he and Brenda made a trip to his homeland for his graduation gift. They just returned a couple of weeks ago from a tour that included Moscow and his birthplace of Rostov on the Caspian Sea. They traveled with a counselor and trip leader who encouraged Garrett and the other tour members, also former orphanage residents, to gather each evening, reflect and talk about the day's events. This was an important trip for him to learn about his roots.
Garrett will soon begin an immersion counseling program in Kansas City where he will be involved in "learning by doing" counseling with troubled teenagers in K.C. The other three Meyer children will be students in Bentonville. Logan, 16, will be a senior at Bentonville High School; and Ryan, 15, will be a sophomore there. Their sister Taitum, 12, will be a seventh grader at Classical Academy, a charter school.
General News on 07/16/2014