Becoming the Pastor's Wife
How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman鈥檚 Path to Ministry
About
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
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
The Author
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Dust in the Wind Photography Beth Allison Barr
Beth Allison Barr (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is James Vardaman Endowed Chair of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women's history, and church history. She is the author of the USA...
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