Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry

A heads up: You will find new heroines to admire in the pages of Becoming the Pastor’s Wife. Beth Allison Barr, who wrote The Making of Biblical Womanhood, is back with another gust of freedom, clarity, and hope.

Barr shows us “the glint of light on broken glass,” as Anton Chekhov once said, by showing, not telling, her own story of being a pastor’s wife and the stories of other women throughout history who led by example.

She highlights ancient women such as the biblical Junia and Priscilla, who were lauded by Paul in Scripture for their church leadership, yet they were erased or misrepresented by patriarchal clergy, especially those in the Southern Baptist Convention, Barr’s former denomination and her main focus in the book. What in the world, she asks, did Al Mohler and other SBC leadership think these women were doing, if not pastoral work?

Barr highlights the fifth-century iconography of two women, Cerula and Bitalia, wearing liturgical garb, as well as much more iconographic and archeological evidence that women led church communities. There was Queen Bertha of Kent, a French princess of faith who was hugely influential in introducing Christianity to England. Abbess Milburga, one of my favorites in the book, was born in the mid-seventh century and became a “powerful bishop in the church, providing oversight and pastoral care to laity and clergy.” Abbesses, the reader discovers, were “exceptional women with extraordinary power.”

But along the path of time, something changed. Barr makes a strong case that women were ordained for the first 1,200 years of Christianity, until they weren’t. The reasons are complex and varied, but forced celibacy for male priests played a part, as did the advent of the “clerical marriage” beginning with Martin Luther and Katharina Von Bora. She makes the case that historical forces began to bend and shape cultural mores until it became the norm for women to handle domestic duties and men to handle leadership roles. But in Barr’s opinion, this reshaping of women’s roles can be traced from history, not the Bible.

As a pastor’s wife for 25 years, Barr is well acquainted with the expectations of evangelical churches toward their pastors’ wives, often treated like a BOGO deal at the shoe store rather than autonomous individuals with singular gifts and callings. Especially in the past half-century, women married to pastors have been both exalted as possessing the top leadership role a woman can hold in a church setting and pressured to be perfect homemakers and submissive helpmates.

“I know where these expectations came from,” Barr writes, “and they aren’t from the Bible.”

She argues that not only does the role of the pastor’s wife come with stifling expectations, it has also slowly but surely narrowed the options for women in church leadership. As the pastor’s wife has risen in evangelical culture, the role of the female pastor, elder, etc., has been severely curtailed. Oh, women are still doing a lion’s share of work in church settings, but most often, they are not properly recognized or even paid. (According to Barr, by the spring of 2023, 83% of women’s ministry leaders in the SBC were volunteers or unpaid staff.)

One thing that struck me repeatedly as I read this book was the tireless efforts of patriarchal leadership, including women like Dorothy Patterson, a prominent pastor’s wife, to exclude women, protect men, and never waver from ironclad certainty that hierarchical gender roles were absolute truth.

Patterson once wrote that “clearly (Priscilla and Aquila) followed the biblical guidelines for Christian marriage,” but gave zero evidence to support her claim. In the language used by her and others to talk about limiting women’s roles in the church, supporters of this view cling like barnacles to their sureness:

“The criteria is not our’s, it is the Bible’s.”

“To preserve a submission God requires.”

“Back to the Bible!”

In 1973, an SBC pastor’s wife called the women’s liberation movement “a great attack” on “scriptural precepts of a woman’s place in society.”

The more this assured language was used, the more cemented the concept became. By 2023’s SBC convention, “women’s ordination—more precisely the rejection of women’s ordination—was a core Gospel issue,” Barr writes.

When the tide was turning in the 1980s and ’90s toward a more conservative view of men and women’s roles in the church, at least one SBC leader said out loud, “I think this is at least partly culture and tradition,” not manifest biblical truth. What if this more nuanced view had prevailed instead of the hard swing toward patriarchal standards?

Barr points out that not only do these views limit women’s agency and gifts, they also do grave harm. As the SBC practically raced to shun women in leadership at their 2023 convention, they have been deeply resistant to uncover or even discuss multiple sex abuse scandals within the church. Again, women are excluded, and men are protected at terrible cost.

Yet the reader is not left without hope at the end of this book. Armed with historical facts and inspired by women of the past, we can, in Maya Angelou’s words, “do better because we know better.”

The whole of Barr’s work boils down to this: “What if we recognized that the only true biblical role for a woman is to do whatever God has called her to do?” Really, what if?

As in her first book, when Barr charged readers to go and “be free” from the ensnaring web of cultural coercions, she leaves readers with a similar charge:

“History has taught me that women, including the wives of pastors, can change the church,” she writes. “I think it is time that we change it.” (Brazos Press)

Editor’s Note: The Christian Reformed Church in North America recognizes that there are two different perspectives and convictions on the issue of women in ecclesiastical office, both of which honor the Scriptures as the infallible Word of God.