Time for Something Completely Different

I'm back from my writing break to tell you about what I've been writing

Savannah Locke and I standing with the archive boxes containing the SBC Ministers’ Wives Conference collection (processed and unprocessed) in The Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives (SBHLA) in Nashville, Tennessee.

When Savannah Lock and I posed for this picture on July 19, 2024, the world was different. President Biden was still the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee; no one had tried to fire Brent Leatherwood from his position as president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC); and the manuscript for my next book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, was still in progress.

Less than one month later, Vice President Harris is now the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party; Brent Leatherwood, just days after Savannah and I ate ice cream alongside the ERLC staff at the SBC headquarters in Nashville, was bizarrely fired and then un-fired by the ERLC board of trustees chair Kevin Smith; and now I have finished the conclusion and submitted the major draft edits for Becoming the Pastor’s Wife. I also have a pre-order announcement date (coming very soon!) with cover reveal & a publication date.

I confess, between finishing this manuscript and the Harris Hail Mary, I am sleeping much more peacefully. (Just so you know, the SBC/Leatherwood saga, strange as it was, has not cost me any sleep.)

I’m also ready.

You see, in The Making of Biblical Womanhood, I told you what I already knew. What I had been teaching students in my courses at Baylor for several years; what I had been publishing in my own scholarship; about the women known to me in church history.

Becoming the Pastor’s Wife will tell you a story I didn’t know until I uncovered it. It will tell you about women I didn’t know before meeting them in the archives. It will tell you about a clergy sex abuse case that had remained buried in a box of letters until I stumbled on it and followed the clues all the way to Canada.

Becoming The Pastor’s Wife will not only strengthen the argument I made in The Making of Biblical Womanhood, but it will also impress upon you the resilience of women. Women who—as both pastors and the wives of pastors—have never stopped doing the work of God.

I’m ready, y’all. I’m ready to share this book with you and I’m ready to share a surprise that Savannah Locke and I have been working on for several months, too.

I hope you are ready for it, because Becoming the Pastor’s Wife is coming. You are going to love the cover! Stay tuned for this weekend, because you will get to hear the news first.

I’m ready for evangelical women—all women—to finally be free.

Me eating my lunch in the SBC headquarters in Nashville. Photo courtesy of Savannah Locke.