with thanks to Brazos Press and Becoming the Pastor’s Wife for sponsoring this post

My grandparents met in Bible college.

It was the 1930s in Manitoba, and they were both approaching 30. They weren’t fellow students, though. 

She was the teacher.

My grandmother’s cohort at the college; she is third from the left in the front row

My grandfather had gotten a late start at adulthood and education, since he had to care for his dying mother.

My grandmother, on the other hand, had excelled. And she had been asked to teach a course, and she had taken that opportunity. And with war approaching, they married.

My grandmother was a force of nature. In the early 1930s she had had a radio program on Saturday mornings in Winnipeg, where she would tell children’s stories (often with a Christian theme). She had a wonderful, dramatic voice, and even years later, people would hear her talking and would recognize who she was. She had a quick wit; she had a sharp mind; she was a wonderful speaker.

But she became just a pastor’s wife.

She was an immensely talented woman with lots to offer the kingdom of God, but as the 1950s and 1960s progressed, her role was largely restricted to supporting her husband, and baking lots of pies (she ended up liking neither).

My grandmother’s life became more restricted as she got older.

And, as Beth Allison Barr shows us in her new book Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, that’s what happened to women as a whole.

Beth, as a historian, has a knack for showing us that “the way things have always been done” is not actually the way that things have always been done, and is actually a more modern invention. And if it’s a more modern invention, then it can’t be based “on the plain reading of Scripture” now, can it? If it was so “plain”, then why weren’t people making this argument in 200 A.D.? In 1500 A.D.? Or even in 1850 or 1950? Why is it just being made that way in the last few decades?

In her first book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, Beth showed how the idea that men and women were created equal in value, but just with different roles, was a modern argument. Patriarchy has always been the backdrop to Christianity, because patriarchy is baked into our culture. But for years women were restricted from ministry on the basis that women were inferior to men. When you could no longer make that argument, then the argument changed to the “roles” idea. 

Yet when you’re in an SBC church in 2020, and you hear the argument about roles, it’s explained to you as something which Christendom has always believed–it’s not explained that this was largely made up starting in the late 1800s, and that it was codified and solidified as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, and that a Bible translation (the ESV) was created for the express purpose of pushing this belief. 

Enter the idea of the Pastor’s Wife as the route to ministry for women

Today, if women feel a call to ministry, they are told that they are either called to teach children or to marry a pastor and support him. And that idea of “pastor’s wife” as being a specific calling for women is not something that my grandmother would have heard. Sure, her ministry was curtailed as the years went on, and she was limited in what she could do in church, but she wouldn’t have been told that her ministry was being a pastor’s wife. She would have been told that her ministry was supporting those in the congregation; was volunteering and serving the community, just as everyone else would have been told.

The idea of the pastor’s wife as a high and specific calling, Beth Allison Barr shows, started largely in the 1980s and 1990s as the demands for women’s ordination increased. It was largely a reaction against the idea that women could ministry in specific ways.

In Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, Beth tells stories that will move you to show you that, throughout history, women held official church offices and led men. She shares: 

• The evidence of the Priscilla Catacombs
• The story of Milburga, a female bishop from England in the seventh century
• The early church’s example of women in ministry, from Junia and Priscilla and Lydia and Phoebe to later women in early Christian writing and art

As Beth says, 

And Beth also tells the story of more modern women:

• Of Sarah Lee and Kathy Hoppe, ordained women in the 1980s doing church planting with their husbands–whom the SBC refused to call “pastors”, though they were doing the job of pastors
• Of female missionaries who were doing the same job as their “pastor” husbands, but who were told their role was officially “home and family”
• Of women like my grandmother, active in church leadership in the 1920s and 1930s, which wasn’t uncommon
• Of pastor’s wives like Maria Acacia, whose abusive husband was promoted throughout ministerial positions in the SBC by SBC leaders, at the exact same time as these same leaders were restricting women’s ministry. They deliberately chose abusive men like Maria’s husband over faithful women.
• and so much more.

The issue, Beth says, is not the work the women were doing. The issue is what we agree to call the work the women were doing.

All of which leads me to one of my favourite vignettes in her book.

Unlike some of the other stories, which take whole chapters, and which are widely being talked about in other reviews of Becoming a Pastor’s Wife, I want to focus on a small vignette, because as I was reading it, it reminded me so much of my grandmother. 

It’s the early 1920s in Waco, Texas. A young woman named Dorothy Scarborough earned her Ph.D in Literature from Columbia in 1917, and her dissertation was widely regarded in the field. She worked as faculty at Columbia before returned to Texas, going on to write novels and teach.

And there she taught a “popular and influential” Sunday School class for men in an SBC church. Beth writes:

Like my grandmother holding court while my grandfather learned from her, so it was not always taboo for men to learn about Jesus from women.

We made it taboo.

And if we made it taboo, we can unmake it. 

Last week, in our Go Be Free webinar with Beth, she said something I can’t get out of my head.

There was a time in recent history where we could have made a different choice.

In the 1980s and 1990s opportunities were opening up for women. Women like Sarah Lee and Kathy Hoppe were being ordained in the SBC. In other denominations, women were being ordained and were serving as elders. 

When I was in church in the 1990s, it felt like the walls to women serving in ministry were about to topple, and topple very quickly.

Instead, prompted by the conservative resurgence in the SBC (which we now know was fathered by men who were either sex offenders themselves or covered up sexual abuse), the opposite happened. Obstacles to women serving in ministry were solidified in denominations like the SBC, the Alliance, the CRC, several Presbyterian denominations, and more. While some denominations expanded options to women (and many, like the Wesleyans, always had), many conservative denominations made things harder for women, promoting the idea of the “pastor’s wife” instead.

What was different in Manitoba in the 1930s?

What was different about Waco in the 1920s?

When you study church history, especially that of the North American west, what you’ll find is that as society expands and as the church rapidly expands, barriers to women serving in ministry fall. When the church is expanding into an area, it’s all hands on deck. It’s everybody do what you can. It’s “we need all the help we can get!” And people just serve where they’re needed.

But as the expansion phase dies out, then all the new churches and organizations that were formed need to institutionalize so they can keep going. And once things institutionalize rather than expand, then restrictions on women are often put in place.

Expanding means we use people’s gifts. But institutionalization means we consolidate power. 

If we want the church to grow, to expand, then we need to take down the barriers to women serving. 

Beth Allison Barr shows this so clearly in her book, and I’m so thankful for it.

We made this. Now let’s unmake it.

Pick up Becoming the Pastor’s Wife today, and give it to your pastor, your friends, your sister. Show them that the way we do ministry is not inevitable, it was a choice, made at a particular historic time. It wasn’t a biblical imperative but instead a cultural choice.

And it’s time to get back to Jesus, and choose differently.