Women, Misogyny, and the Bible, with Beth Moore

Growing up, Beth Moore was taught that 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 were the whole of what scripture had to say about women: submissive and silent. The founder of Living Proof Ministries and one of the most widely read Bible teachers in America, Moore objects to a hermeneutic limited to those passages.

In this episode, Mark Labberton revisits his 2018 conversation with Beth Moore, recorded in the months following her viral open letter, “A Letter to My Brothers.” Almost 10 years later, debates over women in leadership and whether women are free to use their full gifts in the full service of the church still roil American Christianity. This episode is an invitation to hear Moore’s unique journey—discovering what it means to receive women as teachers and instructors of scripture for the building up of the church—and about the faithfulness of God to one woman’s story, as she tries simply to be heard. They discuss the cost of speaking up in 2018 and the backlash that came hardest from women, her decision to repent of her own complicity, the way gender gets used abusively in every part of the church, and what it looks like to keep going with Jesus when the way ahead is cloudy.

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Episode Highlights

• ”I very much am a big believer in the harbor of the church, that when it functions well … it’s such a safe place for me. It was safer than my home, Mark.”
• ”Where I have been part of this and complicit in this, I will repent. So here is what I’m fighting for. I am fighting for us, and I don’t just mean women. I mean women and men, brothers and sisters.”
• ”There is absolutely no world in which I would not have spoken up. … It would’ve been like expecting a dog not to bark at a burglar.”
• ”Where our Christianity … departs Christ-likeness, don’t call it Christianity. … So if it is not like Him, it is not of Him.”
• “I may not get it right, but I can no longer lay down to what I know is wrong.”

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About Beth Moore

Beth Moore is an evangelist, author, and Bible teacher who founded Living Proof Ministries in Houston in 1994 to teach women the scriptures. Her books and studies, including Breaking Free and So Long, Insecurity, have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her 2018 open letter ”A Letter to My Brothers” named the misogyny she had absorbed in conservative evangelical life. She left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021 and now worships as an Anglican. Her memoir, All My Knotted-Up Life, won the 2024 ECPA Book of the Year. She teaches now on the podcast Living Proof with Beth Moore.

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Helpful Links and Resources

• Living Proof Ministries, the organization Beth Moore founded in 1994: https://www.lproof.org
• “A Letter to My Brothers,” May 2018 open letter: https://www.lproof.org/blog/a-letter-to-my-brothers
• All My Knotted-Up Life, Beth Moore’s 2023 memoir: https://www.tyndale.com/p/all-my-knotted-up-life/9781496472670

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Show Notes

• Moore’s three-generation household; instability at home; the church as a harbor
• Receiving her calling at eighteen, off a pre-law political science track
• The surprise of discovering that theologically orthodox, scripture-loving people read women’s ministry differently than her
• Passion drawn from pain; early trauma and a pattern she couldn’t break
• Hypocrisy, pretense, and dreaming of fulfilled desires
• Strongholds and sexual sin: what her early context named but never taught people how to fight
• First Baptist Church Houston as a place safe enough to be corrected and still loved
• Pastor John Bisagno (1934–2018) asking her to speak on a Sunday night, and her own objection that she was a woman
• Palpable disesteem for a woman in ministry without academic credentials
• Playing by rules that others were not keeping
• Scripture as reason versus scripture as excuse
• Repenting of her own complicity
• Luke 8, the women at the resurrection, Paul’s fellow workers at the end of Romans
• Backlash to Moore came hardest from women, including readers who abandoned her studies
• Asking questions on behalf of women without a microphone
• Affirming women formally while gender bias persists structurally
• The Samaritan woman at the well, and a Savior who gives dignity
• Obedience over clarity when the way ahead is cloudy

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#BethMoore #WomenInMinistry #Conversing #MarkLabberton #WomenInLeadership #Evangelicalism #BibleTeaching #ChurchToo #Complementarianism

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Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.