Joyce Meyer has written 160 books with total sales over 275 million, according to Hachette Book Group. Yet her next book, she says, is the one people have been asking for all the years she’s been in ministry. My Battlefield: A Life Broken and Made Whole (FaithWords, Sept.) is Meyer’s memoir of a life she describes as being used mightily by God despite years of childhood abuse and living with trauma.

“I felt like the time is now,” Meyer, 83, tells PW. “I’ve been in ministry for 50 years and people have been trying to get me to do it for 50 years.”

In 2005, Meyer was named by Time as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. In an interview with Larry King, Meyer recalled the moment she moved from being a perfunctory Christian to suddenly feeling "acutely aware of not only the presence of God, but the goodness of God." And she began to lead Bible study classes.

My Battlefield is a reference to her 1995 bestselling book Battlefield of the Mind: Winning the Battle in Your Mind (FaithWords). It was reissued in a 30th-anniversary edition in 2025 and has about 8 million in sales, according to the publisher.

Meyer is powered by her belief that God uses even the most wounded people. She says God has used her through her speaking and writing, which she began at a time there weren’t many women preaching and teaching. Her first book, Tell Them I Love Them, published in 1988, is still in print.

In her writings, Meyer has been open about abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. “I think it’s helped a lot of people deal with their pasts,” she says. “You’ve got to be honest if you want to help. People think that if something like this happened, they are useless.”

“I never got pushback when I talked about abuse; people were hungry to hear the truth,” she continues. “But I got plenty of pushback because I was a woman. Criticism is always uncomfortable, but my work was about God, not about what people thought.”

In 1985, she cofounded Joyce Meyer Ministries, a nonprofit that shares Meyer’s message through television, radio, media productions, conferences and its website. Hand of Hope is the mission outreach of the ministry that provides clean water and food, rescues women and girls, and provides disaster relief while also sharing the message of Jesus around the world.

Looking back, moving forward

Her new memoir, My Battlefield, goes deeper into numerous kinds of abuse she suffered via her father. “Living with him seemed to me like living with a monster,” she writes in the book. Meyer is also open about her responses to it—running away, stealing, praying her dad would die—and her mother’s response, which was to ignore it. Meyer describes her as "weak, anxious, and, like me, terrified of my father.”

“My mother knew but didn’t say anything. She said she couldn’t face the scandal,” Meyer tells PW. “My dad apologized at age 83, and we led him to the Lord and baptized him. And he changed—I never heard him say a cuss word after that. I can truly say that God gave me grace to forgive him.”

Meyer also speaks about her first marriage to a “con man,” the birth of her first child with that man, and meeting her now-husband, David. Their 60 years together haven’t been easy, Meyer acknowledges in the book.

“It was like he had purchased a ticket to take a long and difficult journey toward healing and wholeness with me,” she says. “He couldn’t have known how bumpy the ride would be at times.”

Meyer admits to slowing down a bit to what seems to her like partial retirement at her home outside St. Louis. Even so, she's still doing as much as most people would think of as a full-time job. She is traveling less often—both nationally and internationally—but continues to write, study, teach and preach. She’s contracted with FaithWords for four more books to come, each highlighting “what God puts on my heart,” she says. She says she may write only one book at a time in the future, rather than her usual two or three a year.

“I love to write, love to study, love to put together a message. I’m always thrilled when God gives me a new message, something I haven’t preached on before,” she says. “I don’t regret my life. God redeemed the abuse and is using it for good,” said Meyer. “God definitely rewarded me for the hard times in my childhood. My hope is that My Battlefield will help a lot of people. That’s why I wrote it.”