"Becoming The Pastor's Wife" - by Beth Allison Barr

Barr's book as a foil for my own issues as an "egalitarian"

“...marriage is as much a requirement for Protestant ministry as celibacy is for the Catholic priesthood.” – Gail Murphy-Geiss quoted on pg xiv of introduction to Barr’s Becoming The Pastor’s Wife

When I saw that Beth Allison Barr was putting out a follow up book to her 2020 book The Making of Biblical Womanhood (which I engaged with over here), I knew that I had to dig into it. When I discovered it was going to be titled Becoming The Pastor’s Wife… I knew my wife would not want me to leave it lying around on the coffee table…

I won’t write a mammoth tome here on this important book, but will rather just lob a few of the reflections I found most helpful, followed by a potpourri of quotes from the book. First, though, a little context.

I grew up in and serve in a denominational context that is avowedly egalitarian. On paper, our churches can be led by females in every way (in fact, for a time, a female was the elected leader of our denomination). That said, I grew up in & serve in what I frequently call a “wide tent” church (nestled in a somewhat-wide-tent denomination) where people of various thoughts & beliefs end up making a home. This fact (tied with our general networking with broadly evangelical traditions and affinity for politically & culturally conservative philosophies) is what I believe has led to many within my spheres of relationship to often live as though they are complementarian even when they are housed in an egalitarian framework. I got into this a little bit way back on ep 5 of my podcast with Tanya Nace (available here), where we talk about the actual number of serving leaders who are female, even within our ranks. Beyond just the number of female pastors, though, there are odd & difficult-to-explain things that go on with the spouses of pastors, even within my home denomination. Jokes about “the pastor’s wife” (when the person being referred to is a female pastor’s husband) can sometimes pop out, and though they’re generally good natured, could it be a shadow of some shared & deep-seated perspective (maybe even one that I share) about the normativity of male pastors?

I myself was recently ordained into this tradition, and it’s something I am truly & deeply grateful for. That said, the process cast some interesting light onto the expectations of a spouse. My local church has always made it clear that I am the one who has been hired and that I am the one responsible for my role, not my wife. Yet, throughout the last phases of my ordination process, my wife was part of the interviews. I personally have no problems with it, and am more than a little sympathetic, but must admit that I was having a hard time articulating exactly why this was the case. Since then, I’ve noticed how often the spouses of pastors are pictured or thanked for special events (when a pastor comes to a church or leaves a church, when it’s time to celebrate pastor appreciation month, etc). These events are almost exclusively positive (I’ve never seen a spouse hauled up to answer why we’re behind budget at a business meeting or explain why the last point of the sermon didn’t “land”, for example), and so it’s easy & natural to merely consider these acknowledgments of partnership as good things… and maybe they are! But they’re also… unusual. I’ve always known that, but couldn’t place my finger on it. Enter Barr’s book.

As I understand it, the subtitle of the book says most of it: “How marriage replaced ordination as a woman’s path to ministry”. Barr makes the claim that women were serving in leadership roles since the very beginning of the Church… like, on the pages of the New Testament. Whereas many people cite scriptures such as 1 Timothy 2:12 to imply that the Bible prohibits female leadership, there are dozens of instances in the same Bible where such leadership is occurring… whether or not that leadership is nested in teaching/preaching:

“Honestly, if you are reading the Bible, you'll see that preaching is not the primary authoritative medium. It is prophecy and prayer - what women like Mary the mother of God and Phillip’s daughters are doing. It is what Paul tells us women are doing too.” (pg 20)

The particular “denomination” (though they don’t like that word) that Barr is talking about in this book is the one she’s most familiar with: The Southern Baptist Convention (or SBC for short). It may be safe to say that within that tradition the preaching of the word has basically come to be equivalent with the prime sacrament of the church (analogous to the eucharist in most episcopal expressions of Christianity or, arguably, worship in many charismatic expressions of Christianity). So, who gets to administer that sacrament is an important consideration. I wouldn’t be able to summarize the excellent work Barr does tracing the medieval shifts around ordination, but

Ordination used to be more of a recognition by the church of work being done by an individual than it was a conferring upon that individual of a different status. The $20 word here is “ontological”. Barr argues that somewhere in the middle ages (through a series of decisions) ordination came to mean that the ordained was now somehow fundamentally different than they were before their ordination, and that transformation was important (or required) to be able to administer the sacraments of the church. So if we need the sacraments, and only ordained priests can give us the sacraments, and only males can be ordained priests, then men obtain or maintain a higher ecclesial status. But… then the protestant reformation(s) hit, and all bets should be off, right?

In the areas where the reformations are sparking, women are married to priests who were until this point unable to be married. Now, those marriages can come to be seen as somehow pastorally normative for their congregations:

“‘The priest's household, once exceptional in the community, would now look the same as those of the laity, but with the expectation of presenting the ideal model of Lutheran Social piety’ [quote from Marjorie Plummer describing some of the effects of the Reformation in Germany in particular] . Modern Protestantism owes much to these brave women who chose to become heretics and whores in the eyes of their communities as they simultaneously became grassroots symbols of hope for the spread of evangelicalism.” (pg 84)

A priest’s (or pastor’s) spouse becomes an unofficial clerical role. Unofficial = unpaid. This was not economically unique to the sphere of the church:

“...’urban investors often hired whole households, but paid wages only to the male head of household’. [Wiesner-Hanks] uses the example of mining, in which men were paid per basket but women and children provided the labor required for breaking the ore apart and washing it. Both their payment and labor were subsumed into the ‘work’ of the male household head. This type of wage structure evaluated women's labor on the basis of their husbands rather than the ‘the quality of their work’ – and it rings a bell in the ears of the evangelical pastor's wife.” (pg 106)

This “two for one” model of ministry is as old as the hills, then. Barr mentions that it is still very prevalent in a lot of churches today. The backbone of this book is the 150 books on being a pastor’s wife that she & her team read as research:

“Our study suggests that, for many Protestant women in the United States, the expectation to become a ‘total partner’ with a pastoral husband is common.” (pg xiii)

I can gratefully say that this is by no means my personal experience, nor does it appear to be normative within my tradition, but it’s apparently live & well in other streams of the church.

“Ironically, many Baptists have argued that ordination is irrelevant. Because of the priesthood of all believers, everyone is a minister. ‘Baptists do not hold to the ecclesiastical tradition which leads some to consider ordination the channel through which the ordained receive special ministerial grace or powers not afforded to others’, reminded HH Hobbs in the 1958 Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists. ‘The silence of the New Testament as to the form and meaning of the rite of ordination tends to indicate that it was nothing more than a setting apart or approval of the ordained for the work of ministry.’ Moreover, because of the Baptist emphasis on the autonomy of local churches, it is the prerogative of each congregation to decide whom it will ordain.” (pg 150)

The cognitive dissonance in the above quote from the book implies to me that there’s way more going on in the SBC than meets the eye, just as there might be more going on in my own backyard than I’m aware of. I can’t with much confidence say why we have the level of female pastorship that we do within our churches, nor can I say how many within our ranks wink at the idea that men & women are equally called & gifted but retain intentional or unintentional burdens that interfere with that truth.

Lest it sound like I had no pushback to Barr’s thesis (anyone who knows me knows I’ll aaaaalways have a little pushback):

First, so much of Barr’s argument is basically “Women were ordained in the early Church”, which maybe she feels is a strong enough point on its own (though I doubt it). If she did, though, I can hear people saying something like “Archaeological records show the presence of idolatry all throughout ancient Israel… so… we good with idolatry now, too?” In other words: the presence of female leadership may have been experientially normative without it having been prescriptive or ideal. I feel the need to at least say this out loud because I run into people often who will flag up a certain cultural concern of the moment, bemoan how their sector of the church is dealing with it, and then say something like “It’s the 21st century for crying out loud!” I am not partial to using an argument now that could be used against me later.

Second, I personally believe that fragmentation is not the goal. “Two for one” certainly has a negative tone, but “The two become one flesh” has a biblical tone. So, while I acknowledge the oddities of a pastor’s spouse standing alongside them in front of a congregation, I do not then affirm the idea that they shouldn’t stand alongside them in life. My wife is a public school teacher. Her employer does not expect me to help her be a better teacher. I am not invited to her staff meetings (though I may be invited to some of her staff parties), but this does not mean I shouldn’t want to support her and help her be the best teacher she can be. In some meaningful sense, I am a Teacher’s Husband… and it doesn’t really matter if I’m “ok with that”.

Lastly, I’m not really sure I understand what Barr was doing in the last chapter by citing the example of the “black church”. Were they being raised as an example/model? From what I could tell, if so, it didn’t seem to me to be making the case Barr was hoping. At best, I misunderstood. At worst, it may have been an example of looking for a commiseration-buddy in another “marginalized group”, which could play into the hands of people who are already waiting to cry “Woke!” and toss out not only the book but the thesis.

Beyond my own personal experience with being a married pastor, I’m passionate about this conversation because I’m a father of a son & a daughter, and I want them to grow up in a world where they understand themselves as equally valuable to God and safe in His Church. A good amount of Barr’s book weaves connections between this conversation of female ordination and how the SBC sexual abuse crisis was handled (a story detailed elsewhere on Barr’s co-podcast, All The Buried Women). I don’t pretend to know that there’s a direct connection between their view of ordination and their handling of these women, but in a letter exchange (whose nature is outlined in more detail in chapter 8 of the book), former SBC president Jimmy Draper is quoted as writing a response to someone who’d made him aware of sexual abuse within the leadership of a SBC church:

“We must be a redemptive community. Certainly there are many problems relating to each of us and we all stand under the grace of God.” (pg 178).

This statement stands out to me as potentially the slogan (for good or ill) of this era of the churches in which I tend to swim. Draper seems to have meant “Let’s quietly forgive, forget, and move on…” (which is never possible), and I decry that idea even while affirming the need for us as churches to get a better handle on what restoration to ministry could look like. But absent the context I would wholeheartedly affirm this statement as a guide to see us all level at the foot of the cross (male & female), and in need of a community who will redeem the hierarchies of history & culture to allow God to align them as He always saw fit.

—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

…oh, and a bunch o’ stuff here below…

The 1984 Southern Baptist Convention resolution to cease ordaining women was worded to reason that: “...the Bible excludes women from pastoral leadership because the man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall.” (pg xx)

On pg 8 we see a quoted argument from Nijay Gupta that John Chrysostom implied that the reason Prisca is named before Aquilla in Romans 16:3 is “In recognition of the fact that her piety was superior to her husband's.” While that’s fascinating, I’m not sure it supports Barr’s hypothesis that maybe Prisca was the more active minister.

Pg 15 has some interesting data about Peter’s wife (1 Corinthians 9:5) and Paul’s potential wife (at least as theorized by Clement of Alexandria).

As a kind of commentary on the modern-day Olympic flame ceremony (where female priestesses are involved), Barr notes: “Christianity was born into a religious space familiar with women serving in religiously authoritative roles.” (pg 18). This may be true, but I’m not sure what it tells us…

“Since 12 of the 20 ‘pre-Constantinian titular churches’ in Rome are named for women, [Christine] Schenk writes, ‘there's good reason to surmise that over half of Rome's early house churches were founded and hosted by female patrons.’” (pg 30)

I’m not sure I understand the way Barr characterizes the work of Amy Peeler on pg 34. She quotes Dorothy Patterson as saying that Mary “let” the incarnation happen to her, and that somehow this casts Mary as the “Total Rape Victim”. I’ve read Peeler’s book (and may need to go over it again) but there surely has to be some understanding of passivity from this perspective, not necessarily as the female agent but as the human agent.

Pgs 36-37 has more work from Schenk who has done some data analysis of some early iconography. The big takeaway is: “One would expect early Christian images to depict mostly male leaders with ‘these iconic “power and status” motifs’. Instead, women with ‘authoritative iconography’ are depicted ‘in similar proportions’ to men.” Here, too, we see the idea from Sandra Glahn (and others) that there may have been a “separate office for women in the early church”... that of “the order of widows” (1 Timothy 5:9-10 is a Biblical text cited in support of the other external evidence).

“What we understand as ordination today was slow to develop. Also, the meaning of ordination shifted during the medieval era from merely recognizing leadership function to a ritual bestowing of clerical identity.” (pg 42)

On pg 45, Barr quotes the work of Macy: “...‘ordination was to a particular function rather than to a particular metaphysical or personal state. It was what they did, not who they were, that made women episcopae, presbyterae, and deaconesses. Any woman who performed that ministry and was ordained to it, married or single, could be an episcopa, presbytera, or deaconess.’ It was what they did, not who they were.”

“A double monastery is how medieval scholars reference the ‘peculiar’ monastic communities that emerged in France and England (roughly from the 7th to the 10th century) in which a female superior ruled over a community of both monks and nuns.” (pg 56)

Pg 61 has a dynamite & compact paragraph on the evolution of ordination… worth the price of the book. In even shorter than short: In 1091 Pope Urban II tied ordination to priesthood. In the 12th century Peter Lombard linked ordination to sacred power. That definition later got refined to tie that spiritual power to the administration of the sacrament at the altar, during a time where the institutional church was clarifying for her people the sacraments needed for salvation. What this leaves open for me, though, is whether or not we’d see a similar development in the Eastern Church (since these events transpire post-1054).

I don’t pretend to fully understand the story of the 12th century female church leader Hildegard, but her story (as alluded to in chapter 4) is an important example for Barr. Apparently, she is often cited as “extraordinary”, but: “Categorizing women who function as pastors as exceptional maintains the fiction that women are not pastors.” (pg 72) Pg 74 mentions the shifting/growing requirements for priestly celibacy that emerge around the time of Hildegard, and (again) I’m not fully sure I understand the significance, but I can see it’s there.

On pg 90 we see a moment where Barr explicitly lets us know that she’s (at least attempting to be) wearing two hats / speaking with two voices in this book; that of a Pastor’s Wife and that of a Historian.

“Susanna Wesley [John’s mother] was a preacher, and [Dorothy] Patterson accuses her of not being a devoted enough wife. Samuel Wesley's congregation, however, didn't seem to mind.” (pg 103)

If you, like me, don’t know what the Danvers statement is, it gets talked about on pg 125 (but is hosted online here).

Pgs 129-130 reference the work of Knoll & Bolin who find that: “‘Other individuals from traditions that do not ordain women, or that do ordain women but who currently have a man serving as the primary religious leader, mentioned the ‘first lady’ (the pastor's wife) or other women who teach Sunday school or lead studies of religious texts as serving as role models for women within the church…’ [They] found that these women not only served as role models but compensated for a lack of female clergy.”

Pgs 140-142 outline a fascinating thesis of Barr’s where the IRS’ attempts to clarify only ordained clergy as beneficiaries of certain tax-breaks and the major protestant denominations’ attempts to help support those who were doing ministry (like staff pastors and missionaries) by trying to extend clergy status towards them paved the way for the 1980s SBC collision re gender and ordination, summed up in a father’s advice to his daughter: “You can do all kinds of ministries… but don’t get ordained…”