Ada, Mich. (March 28, 2025)—Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, is pleased to announce that Beth Allison Barr has achieved New York Times bestseller status with her new book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry.
Building on her previous success as a bestselling author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood, Barr draws on her academic expertise to trace the history of the role of the pastor’s wife, showing how it both helped and hurt women in conservative Protestant traditions. While these women gained an important leadership role, she says, their role came at a deep cost: losing independent church-leadership opportunities, which existed throughout most of church history, and strengthening a gender hierarchy that prioritized male careers.
Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry
(Brazos Press, ISBN 9781587435898, $24.99c, Ebook ISBN 9781493447848).
Katelyn Beaty, editorial director of Brazos Press says, “Brazos and our parent company, Baker Publishing Group, are thrilled that so many readers are finding and resonating with Beth’s historically rooted argument for women’s more visible leadership in the church today.”
Beth Allison Barr (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women’s history, and church history. She writes regularly on her substack Marginalia, is co-host for the podcast miniseries All the Buried Women, and has bylines with Christianity Today, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Premier Christianity, Religion News Service, The Dallas Morning News, Sojourners, and Baptist News Global. Her work has been featured by NPR and The New Yorker. She is also a Baptist pastor’s wife and the mom of two great kids.
Contact: Shelly MacNaughton (616) 450-5560
