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

by Beth Allison Barr

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Taking on the unique lens of the role a pastor's wife serves in the church and the community, this is equal parts actionable insights into the role as it is a history of its origins.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"A blistering critique of the narrowing options for female leadership in the evangelical church. . . . A powerful indictment of an unequal system."—Publishers Weekly

"Barr's work belongs with that sweet spot of scholars whose primary research is exceptional and whose writing is accessible to a mass audience (think Elaine Pagels or N. T. Wright)—she's just that good."—The Presbyterian Outlook

"You will find new heroines to admire in the pages of Becoming the Pastor's Wife."—The Banner

As a pastor's wife for twenty-five years, Beth Allison Barr has lived with assumptions about what she should do and who she should be.

In Becoming the Pastor's Wife, Barr draws on that experience and her academic expertise to trace the history of the role of the pastor's wife, showing how it both helped and hurt women in conservative Protestant traditions. While they gained an important leadership role, it came at a deep cost: losing independent church leadership opportunities that existed throughout most of church history and strengthening a gender hierarchy that prioritized male careers.

Barr examines the connection between the decline of female ordination and the rise of the role of pastor's wife in the evangelical church, tracing its patterns in the larger history (ancient, medieval, Reformation, and modern) of Christian women's leadership. By expertly blending historical and personal narrative, she equips pastors' wives to better advocate for themselves while helping the church understand the origins of the role as well as the historical reality of ordained women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587435898
Publisher:	Baker Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/18/2025
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Beth Allison Barr (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is James Vardaman Endowed Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women's history, and church history. She is the author of the USA Today bestseller The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Her work has been featured by NPR and the New Yorker, and she has written for Christianity Today, the Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, Sojourners, and Baptist News Global. Barr lives in Texas with her husband, a Baptist pastor, and their two children.

Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction
1. Where Is Peter's Wife?
2. When Women Were Priests
3. The Not-So-Hidden History of Medieval Women's Ordination
4. The Rise of the Pastor's Wife
5. Two for the Price of One
6. The Best Pastor's Wife
7. The (SBC) Road Less Traveled
8. The Cost of Dorothy's Hats
9. Together for the Gospel
Chronological List of Pastor's Wife Books

Editorial Reviews

02/17/2025

Baylor University history professor Barr (The Making of Biblical Womanhood) provides a blistering critique of the narrowing options for female leadership in the evangelical church. Barr describes how the second half of the 20th century saw the role of the pastor’s wife morph into an unpaid “extension of the husband’s ministry,” as wives became responsible for unpaid duties ranging from the official and religious (teaching Bible studies) to the unofficial (looking presentable in church to reflect well on their husbands). She attributes these developments partly to backlash over rising rates of female ordination in the 1970s, which culminated in the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1984 denunciation of female pastorship. As a result, Barr explains, “pastoral wifeship” became the only viable leadership option for evangelical women. Barr highlights prominent female Christians of the past (Benedictine nuns Milburga and Hildegard of Bingen wielded power “surpass that of queens”) to argue that women’s pastorship is historically grounded, and calls on the SBC to legitimize female pastorship and allow more flexible expectations for pastor’s wives. Barr draws on extensive research to perceptively track the evolution of women’s leadership roles and explore how a rigidly hierarchal system where “male power is privileged at the cost of women” incites broader destructive effects, including the brushing aside of sexual abuse scandals under the guise of maintaining a “redemptive community.” The result is a powerful indictment of an unequal system. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly