The Ins and Outs of Women in Leadership
A Feature Review of
Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry
Beth Allison Barr
Hardcover: Brazos Press, 2025
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Reviewed by Cara Meredith
Sometimes there are books that transport you back in time. You return to your childhood or your teenage years; you remember the people and the places, the sounds and the smells of your young adult years. Whatever the place in time, with returning comes remembering, oftentimes alongside an onslaught of memories – some good, some bad, and some, just plain ugly.
Beth Allison Barr’s Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Women’s Path to Ministry did exactly that for me: I returned to a place marked by conservative evangelicalism. Here, Jesus looked shinier and more polished than ever before, but here also, patriarchal values undergirded every facet of the church. Complementarianism was not merely a given, but an understood, promised rule of the Christian faith. Unlike many readers (including many of Barr’s intended readers, I might add), although I never called a Southern Baptist church home, the values found in a number of conservative Protestant denominations tells a bigger story about the decline of women’s independent leadership in the church at large. Barr’s newest release isn’t one readers will want to miss, for it exposes the good, the bad, and the ugly of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
Like any good medieval historian and scholar of women’s history and church history, Barr acts as a teacher and a guide to premodern periods – including Milburga, a woman who ruled religiously and politically in early medieval Britain. As Barr shows, readers shouldn’t “doubt that Milburga was the abbess of one of the most powerful monasteries in the most powerful kingdom of early medieval England” (55), a female superior who ruled over a community of both monks and nuns (56). Because “an abbess is a more authoritative role than pastor” (57), or at least was in the organized ecclesiastical world of Western medieval Catholicism, Barr makes clear a time in church history when women were ordained to ecclesiastical offices and fulfilled the function of pastors” (60). Women weren’t always groomed to find their highest calling as a pastor’s wife (as Barr argues in the book), but served in positions of church leadership long before the rules changed– “the Eucharist became tied to ordained status” (61) – a couple of centuries later. To Barr, and to all of us, I should add, learning about Milburga is critical specifically because “history suggests that ordination has less to do with the work of ministry and more to do with how that work is recognized” (67). Her gender was not a barrier to her calling, even if the rules around holy callings did eventually change.
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If Milburga is an example of the good, then the resolution passed at the Kansas City meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1984 is but one example of the bad. Centered on ill-conceived notions of the Edenic fall, “the resolution stated that SBC churches should stop ordaining women because ‘the Bible excludes women from pastoral leadership because the man was the first in creation and the woman was first [to sin]’” (150). In the Garden of Eden, not only had man been created first, but it was women who had sinned first – further showing how every card had been stacked against the entire female sex (and thereby proving the argument against the ordination of women true). Even though Baptists often argue that ordination is irrelevant because in “the priesthood of all believers, everyone is a minister” (150), support against women’s ordination had been building for years. When the 1984 resolution passed, it also marked a significant turning point against the ordination of SBC women. As Barr then writes, “Two roads had always diverged for Southern Baptist women in ministry – one that led to independent ministry as a pastor, missionary, professor, preacher, or leader; and the other that led to dependent ministry through marriage to a minister” (152). After 1984, deeply called and spiritually gifted women in the denomination found the road to independent ministry increasingly difficult to traverse (152). It’s no wonder that women in the world’s largest Baptist organization would find their highest calling limited to their role as pastor’s wives.
Because, then, it gets ugly. A storyteller at heart, Barr recounts a time when she stood in the atrium of a recently built $2 million church building, days after her husband had been fired as a pastor at a Southern Baptist church. Reflecting on that moment, she writes,
“the worst part is knowing, historically, how I had come to be in that atrium; knowing how women like me had become ministry leaders without ministerial authority; knowing how the disappearance of women’s independent leadership and the rise of a dependent ministry role tied to marriage had little to do with the Bible; knowing how removing women from leadership positions equal to those of men and tying their authority to subordinate positions increased women’s vulnerability” (155), including into issues of domestic and clergy abuse.
In the penultimate chapter, Barr shows how the denomination “is quick on the draw to shun female pastors but slow to respond to victims of sexual abuse perpetrated within SBC churches and often by SBC pastors” (157). She tells the story of Maria Acacia, a pastor’s wife who is “a striking example of all the ways conservative evangelical gender theology fails women” (159) when she experienced domestic abuse at the hands of her husband Mario, who went on to abuse additional women in the churches he pastored. In a braided tale centered on two pastor’s wives, Barr sums it up as such: “The SBC thought it was more important to vilify women preaching the gospel than to protect the sexual victims of male pastors” (181).
But Beth Allison Barr is not without hope. Just as “there was a time in Southern Baptist history when women were not always defined by their relationship to male relatives, when women could serve in ministry and lead men without causing controversy, and when women’s ability to teach and preach the word of God was less challenging than it has become today” (185), she dreams of another, better way forward. She dreams of women serving as co-pastors alongside their husbands (as is prevalent in many Black churches), and of churches that make room “for both pastors’ wives and female pastors, for those who happened to marry pastors and those who chose not to marry at all” (193). She dreams of finding and creating and hoping for a new kind of history, one that transports each one of us into a new place in time altogether.
Cara Meredith
Cara Meredith is a writer, speaker, and part-time development director. The author of The Color of Life(Zondervan) and the forthcoming Church Camp (Broadleaf), she gets a kick out of playing with words. A lot. You can connect with her on her website, CaraMeredith.com.
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