If you were holding your breath waiting for pastors’ wives to finally get the compassion and care they need to stave off exhaustion and burnout, you’ll have to keep doing that. They most definitely didn’t get it from the recently-ended Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Annual Meeting. Instead, they got the farce known as biblical counseling and a couple of presentations about Jesusing their way out of negativity. This time around, they got two rah-rah presentations that will change nothing about their lives. We’ll cover them both today.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 6/17/2025. They’re both available now! For next time: Alpha Course Video #2.)
SITUATION REPORT: SBC Annual Meeting brings no peace to pastors’ wives
Most of the presentations and speeches at the SBC’s 2025 Annual Meeting aimed to shore up the flock’s confidence in this ailing denomination. Baptist Press brought us coverage of two presentations aimed at women, though, to keep them working long past exhaustion:
- Ministers’ Wives urged to press on ‘In His Presence,’ given by well-known author and artist Sheila Walsh, June 10th
- SEBTS Women’s Breakfast affirms Great Commission ministry in every calling, given by the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS) as part of its Women’s Breakfast, June 11th.
Together, these two presentations offer a rare and heartbreaking peek into the emotionally and physically draining world of pastors’ wives. When these women need real cultural change for their own sanity and health, they get only tribalistic rah-rah aimed to keep them grinding.
The tribe can’t function without women’s free labor. These two presentations show us both the effects this fact has on them and why the system won’t change. For pastors’ wives, the situation is even worse. In every way, complaints made by a pastor’s wife in 2021 are exact mirrors of those from years before.
In a lot of ways, they’re trying to solve real-world problems with false beliefs about a fake god. It’s the epitome of magical thinking, but they can’t do anything that would really address their problems.
After getting real help for depression, Sheila Walsh still offers only exhortations to pastors’ wives
For those outside the Christ-o-sphere, Sheila Walsh is a big name among evangelical women. She began her career as a popular evangelical singer in the 1980s. From 1987-1992, she co-hosted The 700 Club with Pat Robertson. She even had her own talk show too. Really, she’s done a little of everything—including writing kids’ books and being on TV shows. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she’s got a cookbook out.
Her time as Unca Pat’s co-host ended in 1992, when she sought professional help for her depression. The book she wrote about the experience, Honestly, became the springboard for dozens of later books mostly concerning how to use faith to navigate life’s struggles.
Her presentation at the Annual Meeting involved her mental health struggles in 1992. She described the situation in detail, starting with a feeling she suspected her audience knew well:
It is possible to be well-known and desperately lonely. [. . .] “You can be with a group of people who think they know you well, and I know that some of you understand what that loneliness is like.”
She’s on safe ground by assuming that. After talking about how she hospitalized herself for depression and PTSD, she revealed the moment everything apparently got better:
Once, a man walked into her room and placed a stuffed lamb in her hand. “He turned and walked to the door, and he turned around and said just one thing: ‘Sheila, the Shepherd knows where to find you,’” Walsh recounted. “Sometimes God will take you to a prison to set you free.”
To summarize, in 1992 Walsh was in an extremely rare position: She could put everything on hold to seek inpatient psychiatric help for her severe mental-health crisis. Most pastors’ wives can only dream of that kind of privilege and wealth!
However, in Walsh’s testimony—because that is what she’s giving—the real-world mental-health care she received didn’t heal her mind. No, but an exhortation to Jesus harder did! Worse, she tells the pastors’ wives in her audience to “just sit in His presence and let Him love you.” In that divine presence:
“You get to be who you really are. You get to tell the truth. His presence changes everything, so you can press on in your marriage. … You can press on with your kids. You can press on in your church. We can press on because of Jesus, because He never lost sight of where He was headed, that glorious finish in and with God.”
This privilege gap just staggers the mind. Walsh got real help even knowing it might outrage the tribe and end her career. But pastors’ wives must “press on.” They get a forced march with only false support from an imaginary god to keep them moving.
At the SEBTS Women’s Breakfast, pastors’ wives must always be closing
No other job relies so heavily on faith and offers so little worldly reward. Pastors are under scrutiny now more than ever. Because of this, the pastor’s wife carries a heavy load. [Source: More Than Yourself]
There’s a scene from Glengarry Glen Ross that always reminds me of the situation with evangelical ministers of all kinds (NSFW language):
And that’s basically the advice pastors’ wives got from the SEBTS Women’s Breakfast last Wednesday: No matter what else they do, they must also work to recruit new members. The person running the event, Candi Powers, is the SEBTS women’s life coordinator. Of this event, she said:
“We wanted the women at the SBC to be better equipped to serve the church and fulfill the Great Commission wherever God has placed them.”
Then, she suggested attendees check out the booth her seminary was running at the Annual Meeting—obviously, in hopes of them deciding to attend SEBTS. I can see why, too: One site estimates that a 4-year SEBTS degree costs USD$60-85k in total, which is double what my alma mater, a state-run university, costs nowadays for a BA.
So not only do pastors’ wives need to keep doing all the work they do already, but they must also be alert for opportunities to recruit others to their husbands’ churches. And maybe they need to shell out big bucks for a nearly-useless SBC seminary degree, too. The so-called Great Commission is a divine command from Jesus, after all!
I hope SBC pastors’ wives aren’t hoping their communities will start treating them more humanely
If you’ve been a pastor’s wife for very long, chances are you’ve experienced some degree of feeling unappreciated in your role. [Source: Fishbowl Family]
At the Annual Meeting, women received two very different presentations from two very different groups. But both tell the same story of women treated like workhorses.
Actually, I take that back.
No competent rancher or farmer would treat an actual workhorse that poorly. From what I’ve personally seen, those folks treat their horses very well. They wouldn’t put a horse through the kind of workload the average pastor’s wife endures. It’d be inhumane. They know that when the horse is getting out of sorts from overwork, it’s time for them both to rest. If the horse gives out, after all, then they’re doing the work alone.
Evangelical communities don’t have that same view of pastors’ wives. They don’t understand what would happen if these women give out—or simply refuse to do that work. Since women’s work in general tends to be invisible to the average churchgoer, so too do the women doing it. And since even female ministers tend to be unpaid, their work is esteemed accordingly—even according to evangelical sources like Lifeway.
Every so often, we see pastors’ wives speak out against the workload and perfection demands laid upon them. Every so often, we see evangelicals talk about it too. But nothing changes. Nothing ever has. Indeed, it can’t. That’s why nobody can give these women real help or compassion—only exhortations to Jesus their way to mental health and happiness.
Why pastors’ wives’ lives won’t get better within evangelicalism
Sometimes, as a pastor’s wife, you will feel like a commodity in church. [Source: Care for Pastors]
There are two main reasons for the situation pastors’ wives find themselves in:
First, pastors’ wives can’t refuse more work without risking their husbands’ jobs. In fact, almost anything these women could do to make their situations more tolerable would cause problems for their husbands. So a good image is everything to them, as it must be. Most of these women rely completely on their husbands’ income—along with the free temporary home (parsonage) the church often offers as a perk. If their husbands lose their jobs, it impacts the entire family and could render them homeless.
Second, evangelical culture relies very heavily on women’s free labor at all levels. In the 1930s, Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And oh boy does that go double for evangelical beliefs. Women’s free labor powers churches around the world. They volunteer as teachers, cleaners, event organizers, cooks, musicians and singers, and more. Pastors’ wives often assume several time-consuming volunteer roles—in addition to caring for the family’s children and home.
In the little startup church I attended, the pastor’s wife cleaned the little church, handled all its business and correspondence, and played keyboard and led singing during the services. She also worked full-time outside the home, as did he. But he treated her like solid gold, and I don’t think it would have occurred to the tiny congregation to think poorly of her if we saw her at the early-90s equivalent of Starbucks, as happened to one pastor’s wife.
What evangelicals do instead of helping pastors’ wives
So evangelicals find themselves in a very difficult dilemma.
If women abandon church volunteering, these churches will collapse.
However, if evangelical men start treating these women with the same respect a rancher does a workhorse, evangelical culture itself will change.
Neither situation is optimal for evangelicals as a group, of course. But you can tell which threat they take more seriously: the threat of potential changes within their culture.
Men’s power over women would of necessity shift and lessen if they had to start caring what women feel and think. And evangelical men don’t want that. They’d clearly rather do the work alone than give pastors’ wives the grace and compassion they deserve.
So instead, they offer the only solution they have in their toolbox: MORE JESUSING.
In the first presentation, women learn they need to “just sit in His presence and let Him love you.” In the second, they learn they need to ask Jesus, pretty please with sugar on top, “for strength and for boldness.”
Oh yes. Yes indeed. That will give them strength to keep marching. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, it will keep their “BOOTS—BOOTS—BOOTS—BOOTS—marchin’ up an’ down again. There’s no discharge in this war!”
The problem is, Jesus seems mercurial in giving strength to pastors’ wives. Often, he ignores their pleas. Just as he behaved in the Gospels, he seems singularly disinterested in improving all of these women’s lives. Instead, he arbitrarily decides to grant one divine strength while ignoring the rest.
And evangelicalism contains no street-legal way to fix the problems of pastors’ wives if divine intervention doesn’t make everything better. That might make Jesus irrelevant, after all, and Jesus specifically ordered evangelical men to run their culture this way so they can’t change it. So they’re stuck, until they realize the only way to respond to a dysfunctional and broken system is to walk away from it.
NEXT UP: Speaking of dysfunctional evangelical beliefs, we’ll be covering Alpha Course video #2! Stay tuned! <3
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Without question, “Boots” is the scariest, creepiest poem I have ever read in my entire life. I came to it from a trailer for the upcoming movie “28 Years Later.” For the trailer, they’re using a 1915 reading of the poem by Taylor Holmes, who voiced King Stefan in Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” in 1959. In that poem, you can feel the narrator’s PTSD forming in relentless realtime. And it’s by Rudyard Kipling! If you check out the links, please be advised this poem is classified as a Grade II Cognitohazard.
And of course a metal band realized what a great song that poem would make. It’s a good one, too!
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