Sheila: What if God actually meant for women to have voice in the church and in the family?  In fact, what if He wanted us to use our voices in the same way that men do?  What if He wanted women to be free?  That is what we’re going to be talking about on today’s Bare Marriage podcast as Beth Allison Barr is going to be joining us.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your marriage and your sex life.  And before I bring on Beth, I just want to say thank you to everyone.  Our book, The Marriage You Want, launched last week.  It’s been out in the wild for about nine days now.  And you all made it the number one new release in Christian marriage.  We’ve been getting such encouraging reviews back and emails back from people who have read it or listened to it on Audible.  And a reminder too, there’s a study guide that goes along with it so that small groups can use it as curriculum or premarital curriculum or even just couples’ questions.  Our prayer is just that this book upends the evangelical marriage industry because we’re talking about marriage in a totally different way where it’s not about hierarchy, but it’s about partnership and teamwork.  And that works.  And so take a look at The Marriage You Want.  We’re so excited that it is now out there because we’ve been working on it for so long.  And today we have Beth Allison Barr, who is the author of the Making of Biblical Womanhood.  She originally came on a couple of years ago for that book, which was released right around the time as Great Sex Rescue.  And now right as The Marriage You Want is launching another book of hers is launching, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife.  Beth Allison Barr is a professor at Baylor University.  She is widely renowned the world over about her work on medieval women in church history, and she has a lot to share with us today.  I just loved our conversation, and I know you’re going to love it too.  Well, I am so thrilled to bring back on the Bare Marriage podcast my good friend, Beth Allison Barr.  Hello, Beth.

Beth: Hi, Sheila.  It’s so good to see you.

Sheila: Yes.  And I don’t know if you notice, but I match.  I’m matching you.    

Beth: I did actually.  I remembered you doing that.  You’re so good about that.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So Beth is here.  For those of you watching on YouTube, you can see her new book cover, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife.  Let me read your subtitle.  I always forget what my subtitle is.  Do you know what—How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry.  

Beth: Yes.  It’s easy.  I keep confusing—when I type things, I keep confusing the Making of Biblical Womanhood with this.  I have to go back and remember that I’m talking about the right title.  So I do that all the time.  

Sheila: And we loved—we had you on for your first big book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood.  And this is the second book out of three, right?  It’s a three-book series.

Beth: Yes.

Sheila: And I got to read an early copy, which was wonderful.  And I am so excited this is coming out.  And you also have a new podcast series that launched just last week, All the Buried Women.

Beth: Yes.  Yes.  That’s been fascinating.  I have so much more—I mean thinking about podcast creators and the work that goes into it.  It was as much work as the book.  I’m in awe of people—of you doing this all the time.  I think I’m—this is going to be my one shot in the podcast world, I think.

Sheila: So we will put links to that podcast series, All the Buried Women and, of course, to Beth’s book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife.  But I want to read—this is sort of from halfway through which kind of summarizes the whole book, I think.  So let me just read this paragraph.  “Historically speaking, the perception is common.  The question has never been whether women are fulfilling the function of ministry in the church.  They always have been.  The question has always been whether their function of ministry is recognized as paid professional ministry.”  And I love that.  And then later there’s this little line, “Do the work of a minister, the SBC told women.  Just don’t be ordained as one.”   

Beth: Right.  Right.  

Sheila: And as you’re talking about in this book, it’s like instead of letting women have the role and the title of what they were actually doing it all just got subsumed under this idea of being a pastor’s wife.    

Beth: Yes.  And with that sort of in the trickledown effect of it is the idea that this is also what all wives within the church—the pastor’s wife becomes emblematic of what it means to be an ideal, complementarian woman.  And, therefore, other women in the church should model her behavior.

Sheila: Right.  And you’re writing as a historian.  And in this book, you take us through history, and you look at what women have done in the church.  You look at how the SBC has acted in the last couple of decades.  You give us different areas of history to focus on which we’re going to explore.  But before we get to that, I was wondering if you could give us your own history, if you could give us your own journey out of complementarianism.  And why don’t you define complementarianism first for us?

Beth: Sure.  I actually just put my—I put this on Threads this morning because I was thinking.  I was thinking towards this podcast, and I defined it in the—in Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, I think in my favorite way.  And I still remember writing it.  I was just like this is what it is.  And I defined it as complementarianism is born in white evangelicalism, and it’s an attempt to use the Bible to justify patriarchy.  And that’s what it is.  The idea is is that complementarians argue that God created different roles for women and men in the church and that men are called to leadership and women are called to submit to their leadership and to always be under masculine authority whether that be their husband and/or their pastor.    

Sheila: Right.  And I just want to—I want to point out here about the—because what they’ll say is that women, by their nature, are equal with men.  It’s just that their role is to be less than.  But if their role is to be less than based on their nature, then their nature is not equal.

Beth: Exactly.  You know this more than anyone looking at all these marriage books and see how this really plays out that women are not relegated to the same status as men, that their needs are always put underneath the needs of men.  I mean women are to center their lives around their husband and/or the men in their church, and this by definition is an unequal system.

Sheila: Yeah.  And you grew up in that system.  

Beth: Okay.  So I sort of grew up in this system.  I grew up while the system was emerging, and that’s something that I’ve come to really understand better as a historian.  When I was in high school in the—really the early 90s, was—at the time, it was shortly after complementarianism had been defined in the Danvers Statement, which was published in Christianity Today, I think, in 1987.  And that simply walked through this idea that God created women to be less than men and all of the reasons why.  

Sheila: We did a podcast series on the Danvers Statement awhile back.  

Beth: Oh good. 

Sheila: I will put a link to that in the podcast notes too.  Yeah.   Mm-hmm.

Beth: I don’t think I’ve seen that one.  I would love to see that one on you doing that.  But anyway—and then in 1992 when I was a junior in high school was when Wayne Grudem and John Piper published, edited, the Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which became the bible of complementarianism.  And it contains essays in it from all—some people you’ve never heard of before, but a lot of the sort of major players including the Southern Baptist Convention.  And you will find Dorothy Patterson, who I talk about in this book.  She actually is one of the women, who is in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.  So you see this overlap between the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention, as a central part to the rise of this complementarian theology.  So I grew up in a world where this was emerging.  And by the time my husband went to seminary is when what we call in the Southern Baptist world the conservative resurgence was in full force, and this is the fundamentalist takeover, which is spearheaded by really three men although I actually argue that Dorothy Patterson—women were a central part of this as well.  But the story is told it’s Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, who is the judge from Texas who has been accused of all sorts of sexual crimes against young boys.  And then, of course, the preacher, Adrian Rogers.  By the time my husband was in a Baptist seminary, it was being headed by Paige Patterson so one of the spear—one of the people who was in charge of the fundamentalist takeover.  My early years as a pastor’s wife and my husband—I always knew he wanted to be a pastor.  And so I didn’t marry him and then him change sort of the game on me.

Sheila: You knew what you were getting in to, to a certain extent.  Yeah.  Mm-hmm.

Beth: I knew what I was getting into.  So I was a pastor’s wife during this time when we see complementarianism really rising to the top and taking over the Southern Baptist world.  So my early years as a pastor’s wife were in a space where this model of being a pastor’s wife was becoming enshrined and the expectations that were with it.  And I lived in that world until I was in my early 40s.  And I’m still in my 40s for just a little bit longer.  Not very much longer.  But anyway, so for the bulk of my life, this is the world that I lived in.

Sheila: And how did you and your husband come to move away from complementarianism and into egalitarianism?

Beth: Yeah.  It was a process, which is why I also always tell people when they’re frustrated by the slowness of their church in this area or some things, I’m like it takes awhile for us to undo what we have been taught.  And so I mean it’s not that you shouldn’t spur the process along, but it does take time.  And so it was a slow process.  And both my husband and I, too—when we sort of began to put together what we knew of what women were really doing in the church, what we were teaching, what I was learning as a historian, who is focusing on women studies, and we realized that the narrative of complementarianism just didn’t match anything else.  And we also began to see the problems with it.  We were in youth ministry, and so we’re teaching all of these young men and women.  I tell the story in The Making of Biblical Womanhood about us going to this church camp that was so entrenched in purity culture that it wouldn’t even let the girls wear tank tops.  And I ended up having this fight with them over trying to allow them to wear tank tops.  The absurdity of trying to make women protect men from their own sexual drive through the clothing that they wear and that women are responsible for this—it was just really insane.  And so I think it was both the practice of watching it play out as well as what I knew and what we both knew as critical thinkers realizing that this is a made up system that doesn’t match with what we see God doing in the Bible and we see mirrored for us.  So I think it was sort of a slow realization of that.  And as I tell in The Making of Biblical Womanhood, my husband was eventually fired from the church we were at over this issue.  This was the trigger issue was trying to see if we could get a woman to teach high school Sunday School.  And so that was the crazy sort of thing.  And so that was the point where we really just stepped out.  We were like we can’t support this system anymore, and that has been our story since then and has lead, not only to The Making of Biblical Womanhood but also this book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife.

Sheila: Yeah.  And one of the main things that you said, if we can summarize The Making of Biblical Womanhood before we move on to this one, was that the whole idea that men and women have different roles is new.  

Beth: Yeah.  That’s exactly right.

Sheila: That was not the reason that women weren’t given authority in the church in the past.  In the past, they just argued that women were inferior.

Beth: Yeah.  Which isn’t good either.  I say that there’s—it’s a bad system going to a bad system.  But in the first 1,500 years of Christianity, there were loopholes because women could overcome their bodies and move into authority positions.  And so it wasn’t a hard and fast line either that there’s no way women can ever overcome this.  And in this modern complementarian system, it is a hard and fast line.  There is no way women can overcome this.  And in fact, the line is getting harder and harder and harder if you just watch what’s happening at the Southern Baptist Convention right now.  Yeah.

Sheila: And so they will claim that they are simply preaching what has always been preached.  But it’s actually a very new argument.  

Beth: That’s exactly right.  

Sheila: It’s an extremely new argument.  Women, it is time to go and be free.  And next Thursday, March 27 at 9:00 Eastern, Beth Allison Barr and I are going to be doing a webinar on how God wants us to be free both in the church and in marriage so that we all can flourish.  Men and women together.  Karen Swallow Pryor is going to be mediating that discussion.  And we’ll be sharing what we loved about each other’s books, where we see the future of the church going, and, hopefully, we’ll be encouraging all of you.  So join us.  It is free to attend.  You just have to register.  And the link is in the podcast notes for next week’s webinar.  So read The Making of Biblical Womanhood, if you want to hear about that.  But now I want to turn to your new book, and I have this one quote from page 47, which was so good.  You said, “I was reminded again that the problem isn’t a lack of evidence for the significant roles played by women in early Christian leadership.”  So it’s not that we don’t have the evidence that women did.  It’s just that we’re ignoring that evidence.  So I was wondering.  Can you tell us about Milburga?

Beth: Yes.  I love this.  One of the things I really tried to do in this book—and it wasn’t hard either.  Was I wanted to tell people stories that they hadn’t heard before.  

Sheila: Yeah.  I had never heard of her.  This was so fun.

Beth: Yes.  Yeah.  Yeah.  And even things like the Priscilla catacombs and all of these things that people just aren’t really aware of and they are—I mean in some ways it’s screaming.  This early church evidence is just screaming about women in these leadership roles.  It’s all around us, and we’re just not looking at it.  And I’m going to do that even more in my third book, which is going to be fun.  But Milburga is a story that I have known of her from the very beginning of my dissertation research because my dissertation, which works on sermons in the western part of England in the 14th and 15th century.  And one of the things that I did to prepare for my background in the dissertation was to try to connect all of the religious houses that were in that area and see how they might connect with some of these sermons that are passing around.  And so in the midst of that, I learned about this woman.  There’s a lot of these women in that part of the world.  But I learned about a woman, who ruled over what we call a double monastery.  And a double monastery in the early medieval world is a monastic establishment that has both male and female clergy inside of it.  And double monasteries are always ruled by women.  And being ruled by a woman, I mean she’s an abbess, which is the equivalent of an abbot, which is also the equivalent of a bishop.  And I think that’s what—we hear abbess we hear nun.  And we think cloistered women.

Sheila: Yeah.  We think Sound of Music.  Yeah.  Mother Superior.

Beth: That’s exactly right.  We think that.  And that’s actually not a good parallel because that cloistering of women is not—doesn’t become regular until the end of the 13th century.  And it actually is never able to really be enforced in the medieval world.  And so that image of the cloistered woman is really more of an early modern into the modern world reality.  And so in the early medieval world, women were free to move in and out of their cloisters.  They were involved in their communities.  They often took on political leadership roles, which this abbess actually ruled a significant part of this kingdom.  She was related to the royal family, and so she was the political overlord as well as the spiritual leader.  And this is always the kicker.  She was actually ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury, which I just—I mean the Archbishop of Canterbury is still becoming what he is today.  But women like her were unquestioningly ordained into their roles.  And in fact at the end of the chapter, I write about her.  I sort of imagine a world in which a woman like Milburga—she’s born into a world where she’s expected to move into these type of leadership positions in the church.  And I was just like can you just imagine that.  A world in which men support women’s leadership roles and let—and not only let them but actually empower them to move into these spaces that have spiritual authority, pastoral authority, over both women and men.  So Milburga is just a really fun story about that.  And you can also still go to where her monastery was today, and there’s spectacular ruins there.  So there’s a lot of fun things about her story.

Sheila: And what year was she again?  I think you said it.

Beth: So she is in the—she becomes abbess around the year 680.  So her monastery is actually built for her in 670.  She’s sent off to schooling in France to learn how to be a leader, and then she’s brought back and established and charged.  And then she grows.  This actually becomes a very powerful house in the—at the end of the seventh and into the eighth century.  And then she dies in the eighth century.  And you can read.  She has this great—where she’s dying.  And she talks about the women and men that she has been in charge of and how she has cared for them.  And so at the very end, she’s still talking in this authoritative sort of ways like, “I’m leaving you now as your mother, but this is what I expect you to still do.”   

Sheila: Right.  That’s amazing.  I love that.

Beth: Yeah.  Yeah.  She’s fantastic.

Sheila: Okay.  I want to read some longer passages here, and then we’ll get into what’s going on today.  You said the problem isn’t what women were doing.  The problem is what we call the work that these women were doing.  “History suggests that ordination has less to do with the work of ministry and more to do with how that work is recognized.  Is biblical authority really the reason behind the different ways we categorize women who do pastoral work?  Or is something else going on?  Something that history shows us is connected to redefinitions of power, hierarchy, and authority working to privilege male clergy over female clergy and dependent ministry roles for women over independent ones.”  And that’s kind of where you move us to.  And before we talk about what’s been happening now, I think one of the debates that we often hear is, okay, but the Bible never says that women can be pastors.  But the thing is the Bible never says that men can be pastors either.

Beth: Absolutely.  Absolutely.  As a teacher in the classroom, one of the things I try to help my students do is to break down what they—their expectations about terms and the past and help them place terms in past in historical context.  And so this is something we see all the time is that words that mean something now don’t mean the same thing as in the past.  And this is very common.  And so we think about leaders.  Even the term pastor.  I mean this is what—when people come to me and they’re like, “There’s no female pastors in the Bible,” and I’m like, “There’s no male pastors in the Bible either.  They’re not there.”  This is a modern construct within the church.  It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.  It’s that our society is different than it was in the early church, and we have adapted our ecclesiastical structure.  But there is not an envisioning—I mean there is no envisioning of the pastoral role in the New Testament church, which is why—and I’m not advocating for this.  I’m just saying when churches like—you can think about the Church of Christ, which when it always—when it emerged in the 19th century and it began to advocate for a—not for an early church methods, they actually didn’t have pastors.  They had lay leaders in the church.  And that actually is more what we see in the early churches.  We see these lay leaders, who hosted the churches in their home, were probably involved in the teaching, and that it was this shared endeavor.  And I think Nijay Gupta in his great book, Tell Her Story, he has this phrase that I quote where he says, “If you walked into a first century and said where is the pastor, everybody would look around because they wouldn’t know who you were talking about.” 

Sheila: And those churches in the New Testament tend to be in women’s homes.

Beth: Absolutely.  If there’s a more consistent thread about who is leaders in these churches, it’s these wealthy women, who are able to host them, to support them, and really—and Paul calls them all of the titles that we find for leaders in the early church and then also applauds them as coworkers alongside him.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And I think what the New Testament does is instead of talking about—yeah—bishop or all these different terms that we’re so used to talking about what it really does instead is it talks about function.  So it talks about people who prophesy, people who preach, people who teach, people who administer, and all of those things women do.

Beth: Yes.  100%.  And there’s no gender in the way Paul describes those.  They are never described by gender.  The only place we really get that gendering is in Timothy.  It’s in 1 Timothy when he talks about the office of the deacon, et cetera.  And most of those pronouns that have been—that we see as masculine now actually aren’t in the original text.

Sheila: Right.  Right.  And, of course, I mean even with deacons I mean Phoebe was one.  Yeah.  Mm-hmm.  So you really can’t restrict any of them.

Beth: Yeah.  Yeah.  You can’t.

Sheila: Yeah.  Mm-hmm.

Beth: You’re absolutely right.

Sheila: Okay.  So here is why this matters is that what’s happened now is that women were doing all of these things and they were starting to get acknowledged for doing them in the 70s and 80s.  And then it all came to a screeching halt.  And I’ve talked about this before.  I’m a little bit older than you.  But when I was growing up in the 80s, women were doing more in church than they are today.  And I don’t think younger women realize that.  I don’t think people realize—because we have this idea that things are always getting—things are always going on a straight trajectory and that things tend to be getting more open socially.  And it’s actually not the case.  Women have lost a lot of ground.  And in the 70s and 80s, there was a big push towards a more mutualist, egalitarian way of seeing the church, and it was coming in big in all the different denominations.  And then you talk in your book—you give a bunch of examples in the Southern Baptist Church where they really started to stop that from happening.  And so can you tell us the story of Sarah and Shawn Lee from 1983.

Beth: Oh my gosh.  Yeah.  Sarah and Shawn Lee and then Kathy and Jeff Hoppy.  In All the Buried Women, we actually found Kathy Hoppy, and we interview her.  So our second episode is called The Invisible Woman, and we interview Kathy Hoppy.  And Sarah Wood Lee and Kathy Hoppy and their husbands were both—wanted to be church planters in the Southern Baptist World.  And they actually went through the whole process with the North American Mission Board, which was called the Home Mission Board at the time.  They got approved through this process, and they were sent out to be—or the Hoppys were sent out.  The Lees were on their way to being sent out when all of a sudden somebody—and I’ve seen all of these letters of these angry pastors, who are writing in.  And I’ll tell you one of the interesting things about them is that cc’d at the bottom of them writing in these letters is Paige Patterson’s name.  And so he’s definitely a part of this.  But they start writing in to the Home Mission Board saying, “You’ve got to pull the funding from these people,” who have been called by God to go out and to start these churches and actually are in the process of doing this because the wives were both ordained.  And it’s this miraculous.  Sarah Wood Lee.  I love her letter.  She writes in.  She finds out that this is going on.  And the Home Mission Board classifies her as what they say in what is called the home and family category.  And she finds out about this, and she writes in.  And she says, “Do not classify me this way.”  She says, “I—this is not what I want to be.”  She says, “I am called—I feel called by God to be in ordained ministry.  I feel called to be a pastor.”  She said, “I want to be a minister and not a minister’s wife,” is what she writes in.  And then Kathy Hoppy—she was actually already out on the mission field.  Ordained.  She was pregnant with their first child.  And they had just started their new church.  They’re making so little money that they’re having to get food stamps anyway.  They get a phone call from the North American Mission Board telling them that they’re losing all their funding simply because Kathy is ordained.  And she says, at the time, she’s not actually doing anything with ministry in the sense aside from—she said she was playing the piano and helping with children at the church.  And so it was simply because she was ordained alongside her husband.  And this story happens in 1982, 1983, which is the beginning of the rise of the conservative resurgence.

Sheila: Right.  And then this had ramifications in all kinds of mission fields, all kinds of home missions.  And I really like the letter that you published from the one pastor, who was protesting.  He was saying, “Look.  I’m personally not in favor of women being ordained.  But I don’t think that the SBC has the right—that it’s right for the SBC to stop this.”  

Beth: Yes.  Yeah.  That was Bill Tanner.  William Tanner.  He was the head of the North American Mission Board, who is the—I think he was the director of the Home Mission Board, at the time.  And I quote him a couple of times because he’s really fascinating.  But he does.  He says, “Look.  I don’t agree with this.  But we aren’t going to keep another church from doing this,” essentially is the Baptist attitude at the time.  And what’s funny too is the president, who is good friends with him—his name is Jimmy Draper.  I talk about him more in the book also.  But Jimmy Draper agrees with him.  He’s like, “Yeah.  I don’t agree with women’s ordination, but Baptists have been doing this for a century.”  And he’s like, “Who am I?”  He’s like, “We don’t agree with it, but we’re not going to stop it.”  Now Draper is going to change his tune on that.  But that is this initial response is that women are doing these things and they have been doing these things.  And we’re just not going to go to a church that allows it, but we’re not going to stop other people from doing it.  

Sheila: Right.  So that was the attitude in the 80s. 

Beth: Yeah.  In the early 80s.  Yeah.

Sheila: And meanwhile last year—was it last year or two years ago?  I can’t even remember now.

Beth: Well, the process has been going on since really 2021.  But it was 2023 and 2024 with the law amendment.  Mm-hmm.

Sheila: Right.  Where they said that you could not be a member of the SBC if you have a female pastor.

Beth: Exactly.  They said you cannot be in friendly cooperation which essentially is you can’t be a member.  You can’t participate in anything if you have women with the title of pastor on your staff.  And it passed in 2023.  And the SBC bylaws, you have to have it—their Constitution.  You have to have it passed two years in a row to become an amendment.  It felled in 2024 by a very small minority.  So it’s not a law yet.  But it’s being picked back up again.  And I bet it goes through next year.

Sheila: Right.  Right.  Again, they were more open in the 80s.

Beth: Yes.

Sheila: And then what you do is you trace in your book how instead of allowing women to be ministers they kind of created this role of pastor’s wife that really hadn’t existed beforehand.  So explain what you mean by that.

Beth: Yeah.  So I’ll tell—this book was challenging to write in more than one way.  Some of it is because the stories I tell are hard stories.  Some of it is also though that I was chasing two things that intersected, but in some ways had—they seemed to have parallel stories.  And that is what happens to women’s ordination, and that is the pastor’s wife role.  And what actually got me interested in telling this story was way back after The Making of Biblical Womanhood came out and I got—I started feeling pressure to publish something else.  And my first response was, “I don’t want to do that.”  And then I got some good advice that said if you didn’t have—if there’s something you left unsaid, you have the chance to say it.  So I was like, “What did I leave unsaid?”  And the thing I left unsaid was what happened to women’s ordination because it has a long history.  But I still was like, “I don’t really know how to tell that story in a way.”  And I was thinking about it, and I was reading Betsy Flowers—Elizabeth Flowers, who is a colleague of mine at Baylor in the religion department.  And she has this fantastic book called Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women in Power in the Post World War Two Era.  And she has a section in it where she’s talking about the rise of the conservative resurgence.  And I was reading the book for one of my graduate seminars that I was teaching.  And it had a section in it where she talks about that the women who are on the forefront of pushing against female pastors are pastors’ wives.  And that was where I got interested in—I was like is there a connection here between the rise of this image of this woman in ministry, who is an unpaid, volunteer, who is in this really visible leadership role but actually has absolutely no authority outside of that of her husband.  I was like is there a connection between the rise of her visibility and the disappearance of female pastors from these conservative evangelical churches.  And what I found is yes.  They are absolutely connected.  That the pastor’s wife role has not always been a part of church history.  I make that really clear.  It really is born in the Reformation.  But even when it’s born in the Reformation, it isn’t—it is simply actually—it’s being a wife in many ways.  And it is not until the 20th century that we see a really clear redefining of the pastor’s wife role into this model of the best way for women to do ministry is to marry a pastor.  And this is completely a 20th century development.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And so that idea that you are called to be a pastor’s wife.  Your calling is to be a pastor’s wife.  And then there’s all these books that you analyze that talk about what being a pastor’s wife entails.  And I’m not saying that being a pastor’s wife is not a calling.  But the way that they’re—the way that they—the things they put on it are huge.  

Beth: Yes.  Yes.  And I think I mentioned to you at some point early on in this that there’s a lot of parallel, I think, between the marriage books that you read which overlap with the same time frame and what’s going on with the pastor’s wife role in which she is being modeled to be this ideal wife, who supports her husband, who is always sexually available to him because her husband needs that, because he has a hard job.  Yes.  That is actually something that’s said in some of these books.  And so her job is to make his life as easy and as enjoyable as possible while he’s doing this really hard work for God.  And if you have time on the side, then you do things like wherever you are—where the church needs you to.  So you fill in if you need to play the piano, if you need to teach, if you need to do any of these things.  In fact, Dorothy Patterson says this—that a pastor’s wife is called to do whatever is needed to help her husband’s role.  So you’re sort of this jack of all trades sort of thing that you can be called upon at any moment to do whatever is needed which is also why you shouldn’t work outside the home because then you can’t drop everything and go support your husband’s work.

Sheila: And, of course, food is a big part of this, right?  You always have to have banana bread baked in case someone comes over.  You always have to—yes.  Mm-hmm.

Beth: Yes.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  In fact, you find in many—so for people who don’t know, I read—I worked with a couple of graduate students.  And we analyzed 150 pastor’s wife books, and I have an appendix in the back of this book, which is unusual for a trade press book.  But I was really insistent that I wanted to have an appendix that had all of these books listed in chronological order.  So you can go through, and you can see.  And what you will see is you will see a significant increase in them and the types of books that they are as we move into really the 80s is where we see this huge uptick in these types of books and moving forward.  You can also see the presses that they are published with, and there—a lot of them it’s this conservative evangelical network that we see these coming from.  But they often have a chapter on the domestic space and how—that you have to protect the boundaries of it.  You’re not just—you’re not supposed to let your—you don’t have to let people in all the time.  But yet at the same time, you are on display.  And your house is open to all parishioners.  And so Dorothy Patterson says there needs to be one room in the house that is kept perfect all the time.  So that when you have guests, who show up unexpectedly, they have a perfect room.  And that you should always have ingredients on hand to make a really fast meal or dessert if that—so that you can be this hostess at the drop of a hat.  

Sheila: And one of the big points you make in the book is that if this is such a big calling, if this is women’s main calling, if this is the thing that God looked down on humanity and said, “I am going to call men to pastor, and I’m going to call women to support these men in pasturing,” then why do we see none of it in the New Testament?

Beth: Yes.  Exactly.  It is completely absent from the New Testament role.  I mean from the Bible.  I mean this is—and one of the things that I looked at when I was doing this—when I was going through the books, I was really looking to see where they got the justification from for this.  And it is nowhere in the Bible.  They try all sorts of different things like some people quote Proverbs 31.  Some people quote the household code passages or anything about—that has—what we call the test of terror for women.  So 1 Timothy 2, et cetera.  The Titus 2 woman.  That actually comes up quite a bit.  But there is no clear woman, who represents the pastor’s wife.  And there’s no clear Scripture because she’s simply not there.  And so they’re mostly just kind of pulling at, well, maybe she’s here.  Or maybe she’s here.  Or maybe this is it.  But there is—she is simply absent.  So yeah.  I like my chapter, “Where is Peter’s wife?”

Sheila: Yeah.  But women are not absent in the New Testament.  We see women as apostles as Junia was.  We see women as deacons and leaders of the church as Phoebe was.  We see women teaching men as Priscilla did.  We see Paul calling women his coworkers and co laborers in Christ.  And we see women prophesying.  We see women doing all of these things in the New Testament.  

Beth: Yes.  That’s exactly right.

Sheila: Using actual spiritual gifts to talk about spiritual things, not just to bake banana bread.  Nothing wrong with baking banana bread.  I like banana bread especially if you put chocolate chips in it.  But this is not from the New Testament.  

Beth: Right.  What we see—how we see women serving in the Bible is in exactly the same ways as men.  There is not a gender difference in how we see women and men serving in the Bible.  And so it is crazy how we have convinced the church that God has taken this role that is really only available to upper class wealthy people, who are often in the United States, white because they’re the ones who are wealthier and have—can be a stay-at-home mom, so to speak.  I mean that’s a privilege to be—to not have to work outside the home.  And a whole lot of women can’t do it.  And so we’ve taken this role, which is only available to a very small subset of the population and said this is the role that everybody is—should emulate and is called by God to do.  If you are called into ministry as a woman, you are called to be a pastor’s wife.    

Sheila: Right.  Right.  Which is crazy.  Okay.  I got this one passage on page 93, which I thought was so funny.  You said, “I’ve been a professor since 2008, and I can tell you that no one cares whether my husband shares my passion for medieval history.  How my colleagues perceive him doesn’t come up in my performance reviews.  When I am behind on preparing exams or writing my syllabus, I am not expected to ask my husband to help.  I certainly don’t ask him to fill in for my class when I can’t attend.”  As a woman, your husband is not supposed to support your job.  When it comes to pastors, their wives—and I thought that was so interesting.  But performance reviews.  Pastors can actually have on their performance reviews how their wives do.  

Beth: Yes.  That’s exactly right.  So one of the women’s stories that I tell—which actually I found out a whole lot.  She’s actually a local—Waco.  I now know her—who her family is in Waco.  And so I didn’t know at the time.  But she is a missionary wife, Peggy Bartley.  And she and her husband are in Uruguay for a long, long time.  From the 50s to the 90s.  She’s wonderful.  She does amazing things.  But technically, she’s in the church—I can’t remember.  They changed the name of it.  But it’s like the home and family category for the Southern Baptist Convention.  And so her job description is home and family.   She doesn’t have any other things.  But every year she writes a report letter back to the International Mission Board reporting on her missionary activities, her ministry activities that even though she’s in this home and church—home and family category there are clearly these expectations that she is significantly involved in the ministry of her husband, who is the one who is actually appointed as the missionary pastor.  So yeah.  So she actually has to write a job evaluation review every year that she has to send in as the pastor’s wife.

Sheila: Wow.  That’s just crazy.  And then the significance of this is that if we start to expect that every pastor will have a wife, who does all of these things, it really becomes pretty impossible to push for women’s ordination because women don’t have a husband, who is going to do all of these things.  And so why is a church going to hire a woman where they’re only going to get one person?  Because if they hire a man, they get two for one deal.

Beth: Absolutely.  And I really tried to make that clear in this book because I think that is—I think churches need to understand their biases against not hiring women.  And I think one of them is simply this biases that a female pastor does not come with a two for one partner.  And so the church gets less work because those expectations for a free laborer don’t come as naturally with a woman in that position.  And so I really hope churches—I hope this book opens—helps churches open its eyes to this horrific role that they have put pastors’ wives in and the demands—the unreasonable demands that they make upon her which then women are just—we’re taught that this is what we’re supposed to do.  And we’re just supposed to take it, and that it is part of ministry.  And I still remember this one poor woman.  I didn’t quote it in the book, but I read her book.  And it was Confessions of a Pastor’s Wife.  It was written in the early 90s.  And she struggled with her weight.  And she has this chapter where she talked about how she had this dress that she thought she looked beautiful in, and she was so excited.  And it was new, and they didn’t have much money.  And she went to church.  And the very first person, who saw her, told her that she looked like an orange balloon.  

Sheila: Oh my goodness.

Beth: And it’s just like crush—and it’s just like how do we live in churches where people feel like a woman’s body is public property.  And I mean part of this is this complementarian narrative as well as this image of the pastor’s wife where she belongs to the church.

Sheila: Yeah.  And she doesn’t belong to the church because of her gifts—her spiritual giftings.  It’s got nothing to do with how she sees Jesus or what she knows about the Bible or how she can talk about the Bible.  It just is all about image and her doing all of this unpaid labor.  

Beth: That’s exactly right.  Yeah.  And that her husband—go on.

Sheila: Yeah.  I thought the other thing—I mean I found lots of things fascinating.  But if we can turn to the difference in the awards that were given to pastors’ wives, I thought this was so cool.  I mean bad but whoa.  Because they started giving out this award in the SBC to pastors’ wives decades and decades ago.  But if you look at the things that women got the award for in the 60s compared to the what they were getting the award for closer to now, it’s really telling.

Beth: It is so telling.  And I’m so glad that you drew attention to that.  I could have written so much more about this pastor’s wife conference that started in the 50s in the Southern Baptist Convention.  And it was all of these wives, who were like, “Hey, we are expected to do this job.  But we don’t really have any—we don’t know how to do it.  Nobody tells us how to do it until we get to a church.  We have no support networks.”  They were like, “We want to get together and be a support for other women.”  And so they started it, and they actually asked other pastors to help them.  And this one pastor was like, “I don’t know why women need this.  You have the—you already have other things you can go and be at the conference with all the men.”  And they were like, “Well, whatever.”  And so they ignored him.  They raised all their own money.  And they started this really fantastic organization for women—pastors’ wives to come together to get to talk about how crazy their job was.  And they also started giving awards out for the—essentially, the best pastor’s wife.  And in the late 50s and 60s when this award was started, it was made really clear that women, who get this award, shouldn’t get it on the merits of their husband.  They don’t get it because of the ministry of their husband.  They don’t get it because they’re married to a pastor.  They get it because of their separate ministry that they are involved in.  And they expected them not to be just involved in their own church, but they wanted them to be involved nationally and internationally.  And so the woman, who this award is named for—got named for in 1963 was actually an international preacher for the Baptist world.  And she preached at the Baptist World Alliance as well as another international movement and was this significant leader in the Baptist world in her own right.  She was also nominated to be the vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention.  Just imagine that.  And so they wanted an award that wasn’t for really women doing the work of a wife but women doing ministry in their own right.  But by the time we get to the early 2000s, this has shifted whereas now the women, who are being nominated for the role and getting the role, are women who are fulfilling the ideal model of being a homemaker and submitting and supporting the local leadership of their husbands.  Huge shift.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  So very different.  Very different.  And, again, I just want to really stress this that we think that the way it is now is the way it’s always been and that things have actually been moving more and more towards equality.  But no.  It was better decades ago.

Beth: Yes.  Yeah.    

Sheila: It was better for my mom and me 70s, 80s than it is now.  I shouldn’t say that.  My mom went through a lot in the church in the 70s.  But people go through a lot now too.  And they were—yeah.  It’s crazy.  It’s absolutely crazy.

Beth: Right.

Sheila: While we’re talking about the SBC, there has been similar movements.  The Alliance church has been debating women in ministry.  The Christian Reformed church has been debating women in ministry.  So while you’re focusing specifically on the SBC, it’s not only the SBC.  It’s pretty all the evangelical denominations.  Yeah.

Beth: Right.  Yeah.  And so I don’t know.  I don’t know how well some people might really recognize that.  I tried to get the point across in this.  But the SBC is not just part of this evangelical world.  It is a central component of it that is helping to influence.  It’s been so big and so powerful, and it has controlled so much of the publishing industry for so long that it has simply influenced as a–everyone else.

Sheila: Yeah.  So Lifeway.  People may not know this.  But Lifeway Publishing—and there used to be Lifeway Christian bookstores all over in the United States.  So basically if publishers wanted to get a book in Lifeway Christian Publishers, which you need to—if your book was going to sell, it needed to be carried in Lifeway stores.  They couldn’t do certain things.  They couldn’t advocate for certain things.  And so it really did change fiction.  It changed fiction.  It changed nonfiction.  It had a huge impact on which books got out there.  If you wanted a book to do well, you had to be able to get on Focus on the Family, and Focus on the Family would only have you on if you parroted certain lines.  And so it really did restrict what stuff got published.  Yeah.

Beth: Absolutely.  I know there’s been significant changes with Christianity lately.  But if you think about it also, in the U.S. Christianity Today was really the flagship magazine of the evangelical world.  And the Southern Baptists technically weren’t part of the National Evangelical Association in the U.S.  They just didn’t think they needed it because they were so big anyway.  But they function kind of parallel along with them.  And so in the—it is—with this overlap between the SBC and the National Evangelical Association that you begin to see Christianity Today actually promoting the same things we see going on in the SBC.  So like the Danvers Statement, like Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.  And in fact, Christianity Today, for a long time, really becomes synonymous with supporting complementarian theology.  They claim to be midroad, but it was really hard to get any sort of traction there for a long time.  Now as I say I’m talking about—it’s had some significant differences more recently especially with Russell Moore taking over actually which has been fascinating.  But this is the way it functioned in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s.  Mm-hmm.  And so, again, it was a—it was a gatekeeper, and the Southern Baptist Convention was a gatekeeper.  And so if you wanted to have influence, if you felt called to a larger stage, you had to go through those gatekeepers.  And they controlled the narrative about women.

Sheila: Right.  Right.  Just insane.  Okay.  I want to move closer to home.  So you and your book, the story of Maria Acacia at College Street Baptist Church in Toronto, which is just a few blocks away from where I spent my teenage years, where I grew up.  

Beth: Really?  You were in—I’m trying to remember where—

Sheila: She was in Little Italy, right?  

Beth: Yeah.  Well, it was—yeah.  I guess it was.

Sheila: Was it near College and (inaudible)?

Beth: It’s Defries Street is where it was.  Yeah.  And so that—I went there actually when I—I actually went to Defries Street and walked around that area to try to get—so that’s where you’re from?  That’s where you grew up?

Sheila: Well, I’m from a little bit east.  So I’m from—so College Street becomes Carlton Street at Yonge Street.  And I lived on Carlton Street.  But if you take the street car, I could have gotten there in 10 minutes.

Beth: Really?

Sheila: And the church I went to was even closer to there.  So yeah.  Mm-hmm.  

Beth: Okay.  That’s fascinating.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So it was right there.

Beth: I mean he was gone from there by 1978, so you wouldn’t have been.  But yes.  Yeah.  This was an unexpected twist in the book.  And it came from what we talked about with the Sarah Wood Lee documents and the Kathy Hoppy.  I was actually following their ordination sort of conversation that was going on, and it led me to the president of the SBC at the time, Jimmy Draper.  It led me to ask the archivist for the documents from Jimmy Draper’s life during that timeframe because I wanted to see more of the story.  And so I was following that story when I ran across a series of documents that were correspondence about one particular person that were stapled together and that seemed to—and were an allegation of clergy sex abuse that had happened in Toronto.  And that the person who was writing in said, “You just hired this guy for this really prominent role in the SBC, and yet, he has confessed to clergy sex abuse in—at this Baptist church in Toronto.”  And so it caught my attention because, of course, it was this horrific allegation.  But what also caught my attention is that, as I read through these documents, it’s correspondence between Jimmy Draper, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, so—as well as William Tanner, who we’ve already talked about, the Home Mission Board.  And then also this guy named Oscar Romo, who was in charge of the language division aspect of the Home Mission Board.  And he’s the one who hired this pastor whose name is Mario Acacia.  And so he actually told the whole story of how he learned about Mario Acacia.  And Mario Acacia was actually somebody, who was ordained a Southern Baptist pastor.  He went to Louisville to Southern Seminary where he was ordained and where he married his wife.  And then he went off internationally because he was Italian.  And he and his wife spoke several languages.  And so they went off as missionaries and worked in Europe.  They left churches pretty fast.  That’s something I’m looking into even more.  

Sheila: Yes.  That’s usually a red flag if you leave a bunch of churches fast.

Beth: It usually is a red flag.  They moved around quite a bit.  They ended up in Canada as a missionary essentially to the Italian population, ends up becoming pastor of this church, Defries Street Baptist Church where he ends his career there abruptly again.  And within a few months of his career ending there, he gets hired by the Southern Baptist Convention.  And he spends the last of his career working and actually being celebrated.  For the podcast, we found even more documents of the SBC of Oscar Romo actually celebrating him even though he knew this about him about these allegations against him that he had confessed to.  And so I wanted to find out the truth of these allegations.  And so I chased the story to the Canadian Baptist of Ontario and Quebec.  I went to Toronto.  I went to Hamilton to the archives there.  And in the midst of all of that, I found that the story was bigger than just these particular allegations, which he did confess to.  I found his confession in the Canadian Baptist archives.  But I told the story through the lens of his wife, the pastor’s wife named Maria.  I think I cried writing that whole chapter.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Just horrendous.  I think what was so telling is that they’re letting him go.  They’re saying it doesn’t matter.  You can still be promoted.  You confessed.  He confessed.  He apologized.  He’s right with God.  So let’s see what God is going to do with him at the same time as these very same men are getting on the floor of the SBC convention and saying we’re not going to let women do these things anymore.

Beth: In my mind, it just really brought together this fight against women’s ordination, this fight for complementarian, what becomes complementarian theology at the same time that they hear about these pretty serious allegations.  They find out that the guy actually confessed.  The documents say, “Yes.  We reached out to the CBOQ, Canadian Baptist of Ontario and Quebec, and they admitted there were problems.”  They admitted there were problems.  “But we talked with him, and he said that he hasn’t done anything like it since then.  And so we’ve decided to forgive and forget.”  And Jimmy Draper, who is the same guy who presided over the 1984 Southern Baptist resolution that said women cannot be pastors because of the sin of Eve, he wrote back to close this account. He says, “Oh, I think you all have done everything right.  You’ve pursued this.  I think we have to be a redemptive community.”  And they allow this man to stay, and nobody knows about this whole conversation.  He stays as pastor until he resigns several years later.  

Sheila: Right.  Yeah.  That’s the state of it.  A fascinating book.  Becoming the Pastor’s Wife.  It’s got all these stories in it.  And if you liked Making of Biblical Womanhood, you’re going to love this.  If you haven’t read Making of Biblical Womanhood, you’re still going to love this.  I think it’s just a wakeup call.  And I think the big thing that I take away from it is that we kind of look at the state of the church, and we think, “Well, this is obviously the way things are.”  And we can’t even imagine it any other way.  And yet, it hasn’t been the way things always have been.  This is something that we have chosen to do.  And if we chose to do it, then we can choose to undo it.  

Beth: That’s exactly right, Sheila.  As a church, we did this to ourselves.  We are the ones who created this system in which we privileged male power at the expense of women.  And that this is—the story is not just pushing women out of ministry callings, but it is actually harming women as wives and simply as women within the church.  And as horrific as it—as what we have done is, the fact that this is not actually from God means that we can course correct.  And we can actually get back to what is biblical and that is recognizing women as fully in the image of God and as being called and gifted by God in all the same ways as men and as being and deserving because that’s the way God made us.  To be fully in leadership alongside men.

Sheila: Amen.  And if you would like to see the change happen, if you’re like, “Well, how can we make sure that we choose something different,” Beth and I are going to be doing a webinar next Thursday night at 9:00 p.m. Eastern.  Karen Swallow Prior is going to be moderating.  We’re going to be talking about what we loved about each other’s books.  We’re going to be talking about our vision for the future.  And so that is a free webinar.  It will be recorded.  So if you can’t come live, you can watch it later.  But you do have to register.  And if you show up live, I think there’s going to be some prizes and other stuff too that you can win.  So the link to that is in the podcast notes.  Again, you do need to register.  It’s next Thursday, March 27, and it’s going to be awesome.  Okay.  I have a personal question for you.

Beth: Yes.

Sheila: So you said that you were crying as you were writing about Maria Acacia’s story, I mean you, yourself, have gone through a lot on a personal level where you—your husband was fired from this church.  And now looking at the Southern Baptist Church doubling down even more, how do you process it?  A lot of people loved Making of Biblical Womanhood.  But you also got really beat up writing it.  

Beth: Yeah.  Yeah.  So I think it’s been challenging to watch what the SBC has been doing because on the one hand I was filled with a lot of hope after the publication of The Making of Biblical Womanhood, how successful it was in the sense of people reading it and still reading it everywhere.  But yet, what I saw happening in the SBC was a doubling down on these same narratives, and I—and when I got in to the archives and began reading the story about how this all really happened and I became even more aware of how unbiblical and historically inaccurate this modern depiction of what women should do in the church is, it was hard.  This has been a really emotionally challenging year for me even politics aside.  It’s been really challenging to know what the church has done and what the church is continuing to do.  And I think I said somewhere that it’s—all I know to do is to keep going.  I think it’s made me even more determined that this is not something that we can be silent about.  This is not something that we cannot question within our churches.  This is not something that we can just be like, “Oh, well.  Maybe in 10 years they’ll have figured it out, and it will be okay.”  And so I think it has made me more—it’s made me more determined, I think.  But it also has made me be like I don’t have to put myself out in spaces where people, who are not—who are obviously going to be against all of this stuff because I am challenging their power.  And that’s going to happen.  I’m challenging what they have convinced themselves is their identity as a woman or man in the church.  And so I don’t have to engage with them.  I just don’t.  My scholarship stands.  You can go read all my footnotes.  You can go read 150 pastor’s wife books if you want.  You can follow every single thing that I say in there.  And so I don’t have to engage with those voices, and I’m just not going to.

Sheila: Amen.  Amen.  Especially because your scholarship is so much better.  I love that.  I agree.  Seriously, the footnotes in our Marriage You Want too—we have so many endnotes.  And it’s all peer reviewed stuff.  

Beth: Yes.  Yeah.  Yeah.  

Sheila: You can argue with us, but we’ve got the data. 

Beth: That’s exactly right.  It’s there.  Just stop it.  You can go to that.  You can follow that.  And you can stop arguing.  Or I mean if you want to argue with me, you—go to the research and argue with me from the research.

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  Well, Beth, thank you so much for joining us.  Thank you for writing this book.  Thank you for staying in the trenches, and I’m really looking forward to our conversation next week.  

Beth: Me too, Sheila.  I can’t wait for it.  And thank you so much for all that you’ve done.

Sheila: Yeah.  And, again, the book is Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, and the link is in the podcast notes to get it.  It’s awesome.  I believe it is still 30% off and free shipping with Baker because it just launched this week.  So it’s 30% off and free shipping with Baker.  I think christianbook.com usually puts new releases on 40% off, so you can check out some of those—check it out those places too.  Or, of course, Amazon or wherever else you get books.  So thanks, Beth.  And we will talk to you next week.

Beth: Thanks, Sheila.  I can’t wait.

Sheila: So grateful to Beth for joining us.  She’s just one of my favorite people.  And I’m looking forward to our conversation next week too.  So be sure to sign up.  The link is in the podcast notes for that webinar next Thursday, March 27 at 9:00 p.m. Eastern.  Now before I go, I have one more thing to say.  As most of may know, this podcast is coming to you from Canada from the True North, strong and free.  And I don’t talk about that that much.  I’ll mention it in passing.  But we are very Canadian.  All of us.  And the last few months have been really hard on Canada as a country.  If anything ever happened in the future and I hadn’t spoken up, I would never forgive myself.  And so I just want to say this because I don’t think the news is getting through to everybody.  But when people joke about Canada becoming the 51st state—see, Canadians don’t want to be the 51st state.  We don’t.  We are fiercely, fiercely proud of our country.  And so when people say, “You’re going to become the 51st state,” what they are really saying is we are going to invade you and go to war and kill you so that we can take you and your resources.  They are threatening war.  There really is no other way to interpret that.  And so if that is not what you want, if you do not want to go to war against Canada, will you please speak up?  Will you tell your representatives?  Will you tell your friends that that’s not funny?  Will you explain to them what that means?  Because we are hurtling towards a very dangerous time in the world’s history that I don’t think any of us want.  And it’s completely unnecessary.  Canada has stood with the U.S. through everything.  We have been there in Afghanistan.  We were there on 9/11.  We were there in the LA fires.  We were there in the Iran hostage crisis.  We have always been there for our American friends.  And yet, now we are being told that they’re going to invade us, and that’s hard.  So I’m just asking.  If that’s not what you want, speak up.  Because when we don’t speak up, we make these things more likely.  So if you don’t like what’s happening, you’ve got to do something about it.  In Canada, we’re trying.  We’re doing everything we can.  But we’re just asking the rest of the world to speak up too.  And so thank you to our commonwealth friends in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, all of you who listen, in the Caribbean.  We’ve so appreciated your words of support.  Thank you to our European allies, who are very appreciative of us.  And I’m just asking America that, hey, you do something because we’d really like to stay your ally too.  So thank you from the True North, strong and free, which we will always be.  And thank you from the Bare Marriage team as we continue to push for things that are healthy, evidence based, and biblical for the evangelical church.  Thanks, and I’ll see you next week on the Bare Marriage podcast and the Go, Be Free webinar.