THIS book took me from one world (sex-based discrimination in ministry in the Church of England) into another: white American Evangelicalism (which, none the less, sets trends among UK Evangelical Anglicans). In that world, readers must understand, “pastor” and “pastoral” are leadership labels.
The author is a pastor’s wife from that American tradition, but a medieval historian, too. She describes centuries-long processes of erosion, and finally obliteration, of women’s leadership ministries (which began within the New Testament) as deacons, prophets, even apostles. Then she shows how, in the past century, sexual equality, and its consequences for law and society, caused a backlash in Evangelical churches.
My own mother-in-law attends an Anglican church that was once low-church Evangelical, with women involved in ministry. It now declares: “Our leadership is Complementarian — understanding that men and women are equal in creation and salvation, and that God has made men and women with complementary gifts so that different roles are appropriate in the church and marriage. . . we consider that the leadership of the church, preaching in our primary service and the oversight of a bishop should be by a suitably qualified man.”
One useful consequence of reading Becoming the Pastor’s Wife has been an email to The Oxford English Dictionary asking it to compose an entry for the word “complementarian”. I will let readers know if it bears fruit. But, for now, the wider world is apparently ignorant of this pernicious ideology.
Barr concludes: “Because the pastor’s wife role provides an acceptable way in complementarian theology for women to serve in ministry, it has been weaponized to condemn women’s ordination and exclude women from pastoral ministry.” The pastor’s wife is unpaid assistant to the pastor, guilt-tripped into motherhood and housewifery, submission to the husband, silence in church. She is indoctrinated into thinking that “a woman’s ‘maximum flourishing’ comes from supporting a man.”
Scripture and early Christianity show women playing leadership roles, including — crucially for the complementarian world-view — public prayer and teaching ministries. Yet now, within the Church of England, some Christians enforce a Talibanic monstrosity — silencing women and excluding them from leadership functions.
Complementarian ideology is becoming entrenched, in which the only equality and freedom for a Christian woman lie in marriage, motherhood, and submission to her husband. I welcomed the book’s exposure of such a regressive ideology, and analysis of how women have been pressured, even bullied, into accepting it.
Perhaps the most important insight of the book is how recent this silencing is: between the 1960s and 2000s, pastors’ wives stopped becoming preachers and leaders. Up until the 1990s, the language of “support” for the husband was common: now the word used has become “submission”. Even in the 1980s, singing in a wedding choir at a city-centre Evangelical church, I remember my shock at the bride’s vowing “to submit [to] and serve” her husband.
Barr concludes that “the pastor’s wife role has been used to push women out of ordained ministry.” I am not surprised that power and freedom for women have gone hand in hand with attempts to control female authority, autonomy, and sexuality. I just hope that enough people read this book who can make a difference by challenging complementarian theology at every opportunity. It is a sickening perversion of the Good News.
The Revd Dr Cally Hammond is the Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How marriage replaced ordination as a woman’s path to ministry
Beth Allison Barr
Baker £19.99
(978-1-58743-589-8)
Church Times Bookshop £17.99