Dr Beth Allison Barr: ‘Women are not silent in scripture’

Recent days have seen history written, with Dame Sarah Mullally named as the first-ever female Archbishop of Canterbury. For many Christians, the appointment is a welcome continuation of the Church of England’s move towards a greater acknowledgement of female leadership. But not all Christians will be so thrilled. 

One person very well-placed to speak into the broader and ever-contentious issue of women in church leadership is Dr Beth Allison Barr. Her rather impressive resume includes being a professor of history at Baylor University in Texas, specialising in European women, medieval and early modern England, and church history.  

It’s this research that has led her to publish two books on female leadership in the Church, challenging the assumptions that women have never preached, taught or held positions of authority. Her latest, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife (Baker), explores how marriage has replaced ordination in parts of the Church as a women’s path to ministry.   

We caught up with Beth (prior to Dame Sarah Mullally’s appointment) to hear about her faith journey, how her husband got sacked for letting a women teach their youth group, and why – despite the growing challenges of Christian nationalism and a rise in traditional conservative values – she’s hopeful for the next generation finding their way to Jesus. 

What did your own faith journey look like?  

I grew up in a Christian home. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about God and wasn’t in church.  

I’ve never questioned the reality of God, but I’ve had lots of questions. There have been moments when I didn’t understand what God was doing, but the faith that God is there and cares for me – that’s always been in my life. 

Could you tell us about some of those harder moments? 

When I was learning more about the history of Christianity and how women have been treated by it, I wondered: What does that mean for my faith? As my husband and I moved into ministry, those questions didn’t go away.  

In 2016, my husband lost his job at a church over women in ministry. We’d been at a church that had never allowed women in the highest leadership positions, but they’d always served in other positions and were pretty visible. Then we began seeing women pushed out – in fact, they were almost completely disappearing from the stage. At the same time, my understanding of women in the Bible and in Church history was growing.

Just read Romans 16, where ten women in leadership positions are named

Both my husband and I began to question the limits we saw being placed upon women. This was especially poignant to us because we dealt with teenagers, and it became increasingly difficult when girls came to us and said they felt called to ministry. The response the church wanted us to give was that there were limits on them that weren’t on boys.  

It all came to a head when we had the opportunity to have a female youth leader. The church said “No.” My husband said to me: “If we push this, I’ll lose my job.” We decided this was a moment to stand up for what we believe the Bible actually taught about women’s roles in the Church. My husband lost his job. 

Many Christians in the UK would probably feel quite shocked by that. Is it a more commonly held position in the US? 

Yes, especially in the current environment. Many churches have taken a hard conservative turn, particularly on women’s roles in the Church. I’ve heard many stories that paralleled mine. As we move into church systems that are being run by smaller and smaller groups of leaders, they’re less willing to receive criticism and have people who differ on theology. If you have somebody in church leadership who challenges you, you lose your job, and that’s becoming pretty common.  

Talking about women in leadership, how would you explain what we might call complementarianism and egalitarianism to someone who’s new to this area?  

The complementarian argument comes from a meeting in the 1980s when a group of men from the Evangelical Theological Society were very concerned about women having more visible roles in the church and outside the home. Seeing this as a threat, they started a movement to restore what they called ‘biblical values’ to the home, church and broader society. They decided that ‘patriarchy’ – a catch-all term for male rule in society, church or family – had a negative connotation. Instead, they settled on ‘complementarian’, a scientific term referring to the complementary male and female bodies.  

Women are empowered by God to serve in leadership positions – think about Deborah and Miriam

Horrified by this, another group of Christians got together and said: “That’s actually not what the Bible teaches”. They coined themselves ‘egalitarian’, because there’s full equality before God. Men and women are fully equal and able to serve in any leadership role that God calls them to. 

The Church of England recently celebrated 30 years of female ordination. Many people would assume that, with gender, the Church is on a progressive arc. But you’re suggesting that some parts are actually going backwards in this area. Why do you think this is? 

It partly stems from broader social anxiety, which we see throughout history.

Complementarianism emerged after the second world war. In the UK, women who’d been serving in workplace environments were suddenly being asked to step back. This also impacted the Church. The idea was: If we’re going to restore normalcy, we’ve got to get men back to the proper leadership roles they’ve been absent from because of the war. That became: We’ve got to restore these biblical values.  

Do you see this as a weaponisation of scripture in response to external pressures and fears? 

Absolutely. Think about Junia, who’s mentioned in Romans 16 as an apostle. In the 19th century, the suffragette movement began and there was a shift in Bible translations. For the first time, Junia begins to be translated across the board as Junias, which is a name that didn’t exist. You can see the connection there – if we’re saying women should not be in political or leadership roles, then Junia should not have been an apostle unless they were male. They changed her name to Junias, which becomes encoded in many of our Bible translations. It’s actually now being changed back - but think about the generations of people who read the Bible with that as a masculine name.  

Another is the rise of the English Standard Version (ESV), which was a product of this fight for complementarianism, produced by the founders to make it look like women should not be in leadership roles. Most of the ESV is the Revised Standard Version (RSV). They only changed a very small amount - and almost all of the changes have to do with women in leadership.  

What about the so-called ‘clobber verses’, such as 1 Timothy 2:12, which suggests women cannot have authority over men and must be silent? How do these line up with a position that says women are equally positioned to lead, teach and preach? 

If you’re going to say that Paul’s letter to Timothy gives a directive for women to be silent and to not hold leadership positions over men - and if you’re saying that this should be applied to all people at all time – then you’ve got to compare that with the rest of scripture.  

Throughout scripture, women are not silent. They’re empowered by God to serve in leadership positions, some of them directly by God – think about Deborah and Miriam in the Old Testament.  

If you take those verses and say they have to be applied to everyone at all time - and then you apply them to the Bible, it doesn’t work, because women are serving in visible leadership roles empowered by God and even empowered by Paul. Just read Romans 16, where ten women in leadership positions are named.  

Let’s talk about your book Becoming the Pastor’s Wife. At what point did you realise that your calling to academia conflicted with what your church expected of you as a pastor’s wife? 

I was working on my PhD, but there was also this pull from my church – an expectation to be at all the services, to be a leader, to teach. It was a very small church, and so they needed help, and mostly I’m always willing to help. But I didn’t have time for both.

At first, I internalised what I’d been taught as an evangelical woman – that the problem was me, that I was prideful and my heart was not in the right place. I took it to God and what I felt was God pushing me in the other direction, showing me through what I was learning that those are not the expectations God was putting on me.  

I challenge people to go tell me where there’s a lead pastor in the Bible. The word that is mostly used is for shepherding. It’s an action, not a position

This concept of the pastor’s wife role brings together a lot of what I argued in The Making of Biblical Womanhood (Baker) and shows how it became embodied in this idealised woman of the pastor’s wife. Also how, through pastor’s wives, churches were able to push women out of independent leadership roles, because they could argue: “Yes, we support women in ministry, look at our pastor’s wife – she’s serving God through her marriage.” The ideal woman in ministry is a woman married to a minister. 

There’s still an expectation around the ‘two-for-one’ model of employing a male pastor and getting the wife ‘for free’ in some churches – even those that would not consider themselves complementarian. 

Absolutely. I’ve talked with a lot of women who feel called to pastoral positions, and a challenge is that churches are much more likely to hire a male pastor who comes with a wife, who they know is also going to serve. Whereas the husband of a female pastor is much less likely to - and nobody expects him to! Consequently, you get less when you hire a female pastor than when you hire a male pastor. 

Some churches who do believe women can preach and teach, would still not allow a female lead pastor. Where does this belief come from? Is it biblical? 

It’s a recent intervention into the conversation that’s to do with changing church structures and figuring out how to allow women to serve in roles whilst adhering to the complementarian framework.  

If you have the main pastor and everybody else is underneath them, as long as that person is a man, then they say: “Well, everybody else is under his authority, so a woman is not teaching or holding authority over the man, because she’s under the male pastor.”  

I challenge people to go tell me where there’s a lead pastor in the Bible. You won’t even find an understanding of the pastoral role in the Bible. The word that is mostly used is for shepherding. It’s an action, not a position.  

We’ve seen many painful episodes of church abuse and scandals in recent years. Some have argued that complementarianism is causing these issues. Would you agree with that?  

I don’t think complementarianism causes abuse, but it creates an environment in which male leaders are more likely to be believed and less likely to be held accountable – and that’s an environment in which abusive people are able to flourish for longer.  

When you create an authoritarian structure in which you say the only people who can be at the top are men, then only male voices are being heard. You have no female voices speaking into that. It allows people to get away with things for longer. 

Churches are still much more likely to hire a male pastor who comes with a wife - who they know is also going to serve

We see abuse flourishing in egalitarian spaces, too. Like complementarian churches, they often have this authoritarian structure, with a male pastor at the top and very few checks and balances on him, and women who raise concerns are pushed out and discredited. 

Has speaking out on the issue of female leadership in the Church been personally costly for you?  

The aftermath of The Making of Biblical Womanhood aged me. Writing Becoming the Pastor’s Wife was challenging, because there were hard parts to write. But I’ve also seen so much fruit.  

I get letters from women all over the world, including one from China who said: “I found my Jesus again, and I realised that God was for me and not against me.” That makes it all worth it – women are being released into what God has always called them to do, and churches are being empowered to let all of their people serve freely.  

There is a rise in conservative Christianity, and Christian nationalism in the US and across Europe. At the same time there’s also renewal happening among Gen Z. How do you see the issue of male and female leadership playing out in the next generation of Christians?  

It’s apparent that there’s a gender difference, that the churches young men are going to are much more conservative - and also connected to things like Christian nationalism and very hard gender roles. So yes, people coming to faith in Jesus is always something to celebrate, but I think we should also be asking really hard questions about why more men are going to more conservative churches, whereas young women are not as attracted to them.  

What’s encouraging about this younger generation, though, is they seem to be questioning things more than my generation did. They’re more involved in social justice issues and saying: “What is this? This does not sound good.” That dissonance is what gives me hope, because I think that questioning can lead us to a better, healthier Church in which women can begin to see a place for themselves again.  

This article was produced with editorial support from Tim Bechervaise.

To hear the full interview listen to The Profile podcast