The Rev. Marilyn Gamm comes to serve with us as our Transitional Pastor after having served a little over a year as the Transitional Pastor for Pacific Presbyterian Church, Pacific, MO and First Presbyterian Church, Union, MO. She is an experienced pastor and transitional/interim pastor, transitional presbytery executive, presbytery and national church leader.
Pastor Marilyn is a native of Missouri, having grown up on a farm near Bowling Green. She is a cradle Presbyterian, which increasingly is an anomaly in our denomination. For most of her 28 years in lay and ordained ministry Pastor Marilyn has served smaller Midwestern congregations in Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Kansas and Wisconsin. She has also served in transitional pastoral roles with a large church in Wisconsin and as a presbytery executive in southern California.
Smaller congregations with their close, caring relationships hold a special place in her heart. She is a trained and experienced interim/transitional pastor who enjoys collaborating with congregations and presbyteries to discern and live into what the prophet Isaiah calls God’s new thing, whatever that new thing may be.
Pastor Marilyn is also an experienced presbyter, having served in leadership roles and on many of her different presbyteries’ committees. Most recently she served the national church as an elected member of the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board of Directors, and as Board Chair from 2014 to 2016. She currently serves on the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s Mission Resources Development Committee.
Prior to seminary, Pastor Marilyn was a broadcast journalist and executive for nine years, working in television in Jefferson City and St. Louis, and in radio in Bowling Green and Louisiana. She is a graduate of William Woods University in Fulton, the St. Louis Broadcast Center, and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. She has memberships in the Daughters of the American Revolution and PEO. Pastor Marilyn is a life-long St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan, and also enjoys watching the Triple Crown horse races. She is an avid gardener, which she finds both enjoyable and at times therapeutic.
Pastor Marilyn lives in Ballwin with her spouse, the Rev. Dr. Craig Howard, who is the Presbytery of Giddings-Lovejoy’s Presbytery Leader. They share his two adult daughters, Jacqueline Howard and Judith Howard, both of Chicago.