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

by Beth Allison Barr

Publisher:

Brazos Press

, 2025

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 her 25 years of experience as a pastor's wife and her scholarship as a historian to trace 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 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 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.

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

Product Details

• Title: Becoming the Pastor's Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman's Path to Ministry
• Author: Beth Allison Barr
• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Print Publication Date: 2025
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9781493447848, 9781587435898, 1587435896, 149344784X
• Resource ID: LLS:9781493447848
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-08-27T12:37:16Z

About Beth Allison Barr

Beth Allison Barr (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women's history, and church history. She recently served as president of the Conference on Faith and History (2018-2021). Barr is a regular contributor to The Anxious Bench, the popular Patheos website on religious history, and has written for Christianity Today, the Washington Post, Religion News Service, The Dallas Morning News, Sojourners, and Baptist News Global. Her work has been featured by NPR and The New Yorker. She is also a Baptist pastor's wife and the mom of two great kids.