Also of Interest to Professors from Brazos Press
Becoming the Pastor’s Wife How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s
Path to Ministry Beth Allison Barr
As a pastor’s wife for twenty-five years, 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 that experience 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 evangel - ical 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 them - selves 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
MARCH 2025 • 256 pp. • cloth • $24.99 • 9781587435898
Beth Allison Barr (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is James Vardaman Endowed Chair of History at Baylor University, where she specializes in medieval history, women’s history, and church history. She is the author of the USA Today bestseller The Making of Biblical Womanhood . Her work has been featured by NPR and the New Yorker , and she has written for Christianity Today , the Washington Post , the Dallas Morning News , Sojourners , and Baptist News Global.
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
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR THE MAKING OF BIBLICAL WOMANHOOD 9781587434709 • $19.99p
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