For years now, pastors’ wives have been on my emotional radar. So when I saw an intriguing note about the upcoming Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Annual Meeting, it got my attention right away! There, a “biblical counselor” plans to offer ministers’ wives up to 90 minutes of free counseling.
It’s such a mess of an offer, though, because evangelicals taint and destroy everything good they manage to do. Biblical counseling isn’t what these women need, and it won’t help them in the long term. Today, we’ll talk about their unique situation, how evangelicalism creates that situation, and why “biblical counseling” won’t change a thing for the many silent women who need real advice and tangible help. These women need and deserve far more—and far better—than evangelicalism can ever give them.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 6/6/2025. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: Pastors’ wives get a (useless) freebie at this year’s Annual Meeting!
The 2025 Annual Meeting for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) kicks off this weekend from June 8-11 in Dallas. In the run-up to it, their official site, Baptist Press, ran this May 22 article: “Counseling for ministers’ wives offered at annual meeting.”
Cheryl Bell, an adjunct professor of biblical counseling at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS), will be offering 90 minutes of biblical counseling to “ministry wives” at the event. The article notes:
Ministers’ wives often lack “deep, intimate relationships within the church just because of the need for confidentiality and privacy,” Bell said, and such circumstances leave wives facing “some real challenges” on their own.
Based on research and personal experience with the SBTC, Bell knows the need for biblical counseling among ministers’ wives is notable. [. . .]
“The suffering and trials that these women are going through not only are for their growth in Christlikeness but also for the sanctification of the body of Christ because as they grow, the church where they serve benefits from their maturity as they pour into those women,” Bell said.
Around the end of May, did you hear a strange explosion coming from the Pacific Northwest? It was probably me!
“Biblical counseling” opens the door to the abuse and exploitation of the vulnerable. Applying this failure of a field to pastors’ wives only adds insult to injury.
The brutal reality endured by pastors’ wives
As you might guess, pastors’ wives are the wives of pastors. Mostly, these are Protestant couples, since Catholicism formally outlawed marriage for priests in the 12th century. Out of Protestantism, evangelical pastors’ wives seem to have the roughest lives.
To be an evangelical pastor’s wife is to be the emotional punching bag of the entire congregation, the flock’s unpaid therapist, the tireless volunteer with infinite time for cleaning, the secretary and accountant for the church itself, and more. And almost none of these women have any idea what’s in store for them before it hits them in the face.
Evangelicalism has no way to prepare women for it, either. When I was Pentecostal in the 1980s-1990s, my denomination’s Bible College offered a major in being a pastor’s wife. Its courses taught women basic secretarial tasks, playing the keyboard/piano and singing, and conducting social gatherings like prayer meetings and potlucks. But somehow, they skipped talking about the negative parts of the role.
In 2017, I wrote about the heartbreaking exhaustion of these women. They wrote testimonies of the endless work, the tireless emotional labor they felt obligated to give everyone around them, and most of all of the complete heartless disregard their pastor husbands had for their needs. I guarantee none of them expected any of this stuff.
Nothing’s improved since then. Pastors’ wives still face endless work, no pay, no thanks, no appreciation, no help, and no mercy shown.
And some idiot thinks “biblical counseling” is going to do the trick.
That second explosion you just heard was most definitely me.
A quick rundown: ‘biblical counseling’
In Christianese, the adjective “biblical” describes something that aligns with an evangelical culture-warrior worldview. Often, something “biblical” functions as a vastly inferior but tribe-approved evangelical substitute.
So “biblical marriage” is straights-only, mixed-sex marriage following Victorian gender roles, and—all too often—domestic violence. “Biblical parenting” involves homeschooling, strict rules, and harsh punishments. Biblical marriage results in more divorces, and biblical parenting results in extremely screwed-up adults.
Similarly, biblical counseling uses evangelical interpretations of the Bible to gaslight clients and tell them to Jesus their cares away. Even its advocates concede that it has some very serious flaws as a model. Its critics have even more to say about those flaws.
Biblical counseling swaps real therapy for a one-on-one Bible study that’s custom-designed to uphold a sickeningly authoritarian status quo. At its worst, it excuses predators like Josh Duggar. At its best, it will give pastors’ wives enough chiding and rah-rah to hopefully carry them through the next few months.
Here are a few select quotes from Twitter Christians about it, mostly responding to yet another very poorly-advised post from The Gospel Coalition (a hardline Calvinist/Reformed group):
Ppl ask why victims don’t speak up about bad treatment sooner. Sometimes it’s because this model of forgiveness is taught in “biblical counseling.” 1-Never bring up the offense again 2-Don’t mention it to anyone 3-Don’t dwell on it anymore [Source: @neeva_walters, 2025]
Biblical counseling is dangerous. [Source: @wartwatch, 2025]
[I]t’s nothing more than poor psychology laced with scripture [Source: @kadoocee, 2025]
The damage that Jay Adams unleashed with this counseling approach is incalculable. [Source: @BrandonMShow, 2025]
Incidentally, Jay Adams is regarded as the father of biblical counseling, which sometimes is called nouthetic counseling. “Nouthetic” just means a Christianese combo of Bible verses and accusations of sin. In my opinion, Adams is a perverted creep whose hard drives need to be searched immediately. He openly suggested that a sexually abused child might have “participated willingly in the sin” and “enticed her father.” And evangelicals trust this weirdo to give them their framework for biblical counseling.
The SBC’s leaders rejected pastoral counseling for biblical counseling in the 2000s. See, pastoral counseling is too much like real counseling for them. It uses way too many real-world techniques to help clients. Biblical counseling uses almost none of those techniques and addresses the imaginary problem of sin instead, which is why it doesn’t work. Still, by 2007 SBC seminaries taught only biblical counseling.
And now Cheryl Bell, a SWBTS professor, is peddling it to pastors’ wives. Hooray Team Jesus!
What pastors’ wives say about their lives
Evangelicals think a 90-minute Bible study will resolve what pastors’ wives face every day. That blows my mind. The reality of being a pastor’s wife is completely unlike evangelicals’ misconceptions of the role. They don’t have any idea what pastors’ wives experience, and they don’t want to learn.
Pastors’ wives are trying to get the word out, though:
Fundamentalist Christians. But also, being a Christian pastor’s wife for 11 years. I saw the corruption from the inside. I am no longer Christian or married. I had enough of both. [Source: @JudithDocken, 2022]
[W]ith the exception of our husband, being able to find and trust someone you can freely confide in just doesn’t happen. Many pastor wives feel isolated and lonely. [Source: @ThePastorsWife5, 2023; her entire feed’s good reading too]
Three weeks ago I separated from my Pastor husband. Not ONE person from church has reached out to me to check on me. Today I confirmed they haven’t been told about our separation. [Source: @NotAGoodPW, 2024]
As a pastor’s wife, Connie Johnson felt pressured to uphold a perfect image. Turning to antidepressants, she found no relief. Exhausted, she discovered Andrew’s Gospel Truth show and heard a life-changing message. [Uh-huh. Sure she did. Source: @andrewwommack, 2024]
Been going through my old journals -I found one ab having to lose 5 lbs bc our ⛪️ [church emoji] forced the pastors & their wives to come in to the office for a BMI check to make sure we were all “FIT for leadership”. [Source: @WifeWorst, 2024; she’s got a good feed too]
These brave women expose evangelicalism’s deep rot and dysfunction. The isolation, loneliness, harsh judgment, and all too frequent emotional abuse they experience can’t be fixed in 90 minutes. All 90 minutes of biblical counseling will do is give them an opportunity to talk to someone about their problems. Maybe they’ll get a dose of Bible verses they can use to try to pep themselves up a little.
Without deep reforms, though, they’ll be heading right back into the trenches with nothing whatsoever changed. Even pastors’ wives who are themselves biblical counselors get no real help from their training, as we see in a January 2025 interview on the podcast Joyful Journey. They know the Bible verses already. The Bible verses already don’t help. Going over them again won’t start helping.
What pastors’ wives experience can’t be fixed with Bible studies and blame games
When I began researching this topic, naturally I pulled up all the sources from my 2017 post (relink). I wasn’t surprised at all to notice that almost all of those sources are dead links now. (This is why we archive everything!) Evangelicals go through phases where they notice pastors’ wives’ suffering and then forget all about it for a few years. If they notice pastors’ wives at all, it’s to exhort them to keep suffering.
But the problems these women described back then haven’t gone away. They’ve always been there. Worse, they’re getting worse as evangelicals polarize more and more into right-wing extremism.
In 2022, one pastor’s wife wrote in The Set-Apart Walk that women like her are often called “ministry widows” because “their husbands are dead to them.” A February 2025 podcast, The World of Difference, features one who “got [her] husband in trouble” because she took her kids to Starbucks and got spotted by a congregant, who felt she was patronizing a “left liberal” business with an “agenda.” As their pastor’s wife, everything she did reflected on her husband—so this fun outing with the kids became drama.
Another pastor’s wife wrote on Mumsnet in January 2023 that she was “finding the expectations on me as a Pastor’s wife impossible to fulfil.” These included: three open house meetings a week, all the childcare and cooking duties during those meetings, leading the worship team, and “incidental” meetups with the congregation—plus caring for her newborn and working a full-time job as a teacher. The worst part: she was wondering if she was being unreasonable about all of it! (NB to OP: No, YANBU. DTMFA.)
Patriarchy is the problem, as usual
When we look at the core of the problem pastors’ wives face, we find the sex-based subjugation that women in general have always faced. Where women are powerless, men abuse women with impunity. Jesus has never stopped that abuse from happening, and he never will. Only real-world measures can do that. And evangelicals have never liked real-world measures that limit men’s power over women. In fact, evangelical men are busy concocting another conservative schism within the SBC because they think women have gotten entirely too uppity over the past 25 years.
By now, evangelical congregations have gotten used to regarding pastors’ wives as silent workhorses. Even these women’s husbands only heap more work on them. Many evangelicals even think that the suffering of pastors’ wives is part of Jesus’ divine plan for self-improvement. Even Cheryl Bell, the biblical counselor in the original Baptist Press story, explicitly said so! It’s absolutely repulsive.
For all of their pain, pastors’ wives only get band-aids: short vacations, endless lists of Bible verses, and—of course—biblical counseling. Alas, those band-aids only maintain evangelicalism’s systemic structures. Nobody within evangelicalism can change any of that.
Pastors’ wives deserve far better than they have ever gotten from evangelicalism. And evangelicalism will never provide it to them. It is structurally impossible for evangelicals to make the changes needed for such an outcome.
I just wonder when they’ll finally say “Enough!” —and let evangelical men choke on their own systemic rot and corruption.
NEXT UP: The 2025 SBC Annual Meeting! See you soon! <3
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