(Thank you, Brazos Press, for sponsoring this post! Our sponsors make what we do possible, and we are so excited to be able to endorse and promote this book.) 

Beth Allison Barr knows what it is to be pigeonholed because she’s a woman.

To be told that even though she can lecture graduate students at her day job, she’s not allowed to teach teenage boys Sunday School.

She knows what it is to be told her biggest ministry is baking banana bread (and making sure her husband is sexually satisfied).

After all, he’s the pastor.

She’s just the pastor’s wife.

Last week, Beth Allison Barr released her second book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, a follow-up to the amazing book The Making of Biblical Womanhood.

In her first book, Beth (and I’ll call her Beth, since she’s a friend, and I’m sure she’d love to be your friend too), showed how the idea behind complementarianism—that God made men and women equal, but just with different roles—is not an ancient understanding of the biblical text, but rather a totally new take. And it doesn’t hold water.

In her newest book, she shows how the role of pastor’s wife expanded and codified in the last sixty years in evangelicalism, just as calls for women’s ordination were heating up. Instead of listening to those calls to empower women to serve God on their own merits, the church told women who felt called to ministry that they were called to minister by proxy. They were called to be pastor’s wives.

Join Beth Allison Barr and me next Thursday, March 27 at 9 pm EST for a FREE webinar—Go, Be Free! With Karen Swallow Prior moderating.

It’s free, but you do have to register!

Here’s Beth:

An excerpt from Becoming the Pastor’s Wife

The Cost of Dorothy’s Hats

I stood in the atrium of our recently built $2 million church building. It was in the early days after my husband was fired. My sleeveless shirt was gauzy blue. I remember because the tears I fought to suppress came anyway, sliding down my face to stain my shirt. The shirt hung loose on me; for the first (and only) time in my life, I had lost my appetite. The stress of what was happening to us, my disbelief that the people who knew us so well would let this happen to us, had overwhelmed my body. I stopped eating; I stopped sleeping; I stopped laughing. That Sunday morning, I followed one of the elders out of the worship service on a whim—a last- ditch effort to plead for my husband’s job.

Sympathy showed in his face as we stood in the morning light that flooded through the tall windows and pooled on the polished concrete floor. He was my friend, but in that moment it wasn’t my friend listening to my story. It was a male church elder, authorized by a particular interpretation of 1 Timothy 2–3. I watched when he walked away to stand by another elder. I could tell he was conveying my words. Only a few feet separated us, but I wasn’t invited to join them. Their posture, backs turned away and heads bent, signaled a closed space almost as clearly as if they had shut an office door.

This didn’t surprise me.

As a pastor’s wife in a conservative evangelical church, I had served like a leader for fourteen years. I had been interviewed like a leader before my husband was offered the job, I had conformed to leadership expectations, and I was perceived as a leader by the church congregation.

But I wasn’t one.

I reflected pastoral authority but carried none of my own. I was a glorified volunteer who invested several hours a week in ministry work yet was not included in any official leadership role. At best, my efforts that morning would be received as that of a suffering wife, perhaps helping to soften the blow of the sudden job loss on our family. They wouldn’t be received as that of a leader with wisdom about the implications this decision had for the community. I had played a significant role for fourteen years teaching and guiding a subset of the congregation, yet my voice was excluded from a conversation about the fate of that ministry.

The worst part wasn’t the realization that my last- ditch effort would fail (which it did).

The worst part wasn’t my growing concern with a theology and ecclesiology that concentrated church governance in a very small group of men.

The worst part wasn’t understanding, perhaps for the first time in my experience as a pastor’s wife, how contingent my role was— that all the influence I had wielded, authority in ministry I had carried, had come only as an extension of my husband’s job.

I didn’t understand the worst part until later, after I had time to reflect, and even then, I didn’t fully know the worst of it.

I do now.

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.

You see, during a research trip to the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville— exactly one week before the 2023 annual Southern Baptist convention in New Orleans—I began to uncover a story hauntingly familiar to the sex abuse crisis plaguing the SBC. A story connecting the dots between a gender theology that rejects women’s independent pastoral authority and a culture that privileges male clergy over clergy abuse victims. A story that shows the precarity of the pastor’s wife role.

It took me eight months to piece together the story, with the assistance of the SBC archives in Nashville, the Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec at their main office in Toronto, and the archives in the neighboring town of Hamilton, as well as conversations with former church members at Dufferin Street Baptist Church in Toronto.

The story I uncovered reinforced for me how lucky I am in my personal experience as a pastor’s wife.

I may have been powerless in that atrium seven years ago, but I have never been powerless in my marriage. I am married to a kind and generous man who loves Jesus, has integrity, and believes fully in the dignity and equality of women. He majored in social work and became a pastor because he felt called to help people— not because he wanted to build a social media platform and preach before thousands of people. Neither money nor power motivate him. He isn’t perfect, but he is a man after God’s own heart; he loves me and our children deeply.

I am lucky.

Not all pastors’ wives are.

Content taken from Becoming the Pastor’s Wife by Beth Allison Barr ©2025. Used by permission of Brazos Press.

This is an important book, and I hope it will change the conversation about women’s roles in ministry.

As Beth says:

And:

Pick up Becoming the Pastor’s Wife! And sign up for our FREE webinar too!