Meri is a missionary of the General Board of Global Ministries serving as a Church and Community worker. She is Director of Cookson Hills Center United Methodist Mission,  a mission project to the Cherokee Indians in the Cookson Hills of Oklahoma. As an Administrator, Meri administers a thrift shop, a craft shop, cottage industries, food-cooperative, summer work camps, counseling and health programs, special projects and other programs that focus on children, senior citizens, health and education issues. She is a graduate of Brockport State University where she received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Physical Education. After teaching high school physical education for four years she returned to school at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts where she received a Master of Religious Education Degree. While in seminary, she served as a student intern working with Kiowa and Wichita Indians in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Meri served a large church in Lockport, New York as the Director of Christian Education and provided an outreach ministry in the Niagara County jail and on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation. She continued her education while in New York at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, working on a Ph.D. in church history. She is presently working on her D. Min. at Trinity Seminary. In January 1985, she assumed the position of Director of Campus Ministry at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Rev. Whitaker was appointed to the World Methodist Council in 1996 and in her spare time pastors a 12-Step-Church (for people recovering from drugs and alcohol) in Vian, Oklahoma. She holds local church membership in the Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference.