PRINTOn the inside looking out: A pastor's office with a view
The senior pastor wants to help those outside of her four walls
Andrew Williams
The Rev. Amy Gearhart is senior pastor at Missouri United Methodist Church. Although she writes her sermons in her office, she is inspired by the world outside her window.
November 4, 2010 | 12:00 a.m. CST
The worst part about Amy Gearhart’s office is the walls.
She’s also not crazy about the mahogany desk and steel-blue leather chair — corporate objects that intimidate instead of welcome. She’s getting rid of the chair soon.
- A beautiful home: The room of an interior designer
- The cooking nook: The kitchen of three Chinese women
- The kids' corner: A second-grade classroom
- Room of dreams: A 3-year-old's bedroom
- The safe space: The women's center
- Room for development: A photographer's darkroom
- The art of folding: An origami artist's studio
- Drag Duds: A drag queen's bedroom
- Man cave: An outdoorsman's underground lair
- Sewing sequins: A seamstress' workroom
- Artist Hideaway: A painter's studio
- Memory cues: A room in a nursing home
- Clippers: One man's living room barber shop
- A room of their own
What she loves are the windows. One of them serves as Gearhart’s inspiration when she writes her sermons every Tuesday. On the other side of the window is the real world: a Dumpster, a parking lot, a playground and a stretch of Locust Street. The window shows her kids playing, students walking by and a homeless man crawling around in the Dumpster.
The image of the homeless man is more important to Gearhart than any of the changes she has made to the senior pastor’s office at Missouri United Methodist Church since she started there July 1.
It’s more important than the symbolic pictures that hang on the walls, including the one of the sun’s rays breaking though the fog that hovers over a Wisconsin lake where she vacations.
It’s more important than the brown leather couch where people sit and tell Gearhart their problems. When they want to pray with her, she kneels on the carpeted floor so she can be as close to them as possible. If they want, she holds their hands.
It’s even more important than the three jars of M&Ms, including both regular and peanut, she keeps out to encourage people to visit her office. It works, she says.
Gearhart sees the homeless man because of her window. It’s the most meaningful part of a room filled with mementos from her ministry career and stacks of cards from parishioners and Bibles — lots of Bibles — including the gray one that goes everywhere with her. A veil-like panel covers the window and helps to keep the sun’s glare off Gearhart’s computer screen. But she’s still able to see out of it.
Out is where she needs to be, where she needs her parishioners to be.
“We can’t be in these walls kind of sequestered off and playing church,” she says. “We’ve got to be out there in the world ministering to very real needs.”
Jesus didn’t do his work in an office, and Gearhart says she won’t either.
