Her persona embodies what a young fan described to me as the “Southern-belle white Christian woman.” She rarely spoke to the press and made a point of keeping her politics to herself. Moore’s success was possible because she spent her career carefully mapping the boundaries of acceptability for female evangelical leaders. “It would be hard to find a church anywhere where at least some segment of the congregation has not been through at least one Beth Moore study,” Russell Moore, the head of the political arm of the Southern Baptist Convention (and no relation to Beth) told me. Today, her Bible studies are ubiquitous, guiding readers through scriptural passages with group-discussion questions and fill-in-the-blank workbooks. She was the first woman to have a Bible study published by LifeWay, the Christian retail giant, and has since reached 22 million women, the most among its female authors. “Beth just is a category by herself.”Ī publishing career followed, further magnifying Moore’s influence. “She’s a singularly influential figure among evangelicals as a woman leader,” Ed Stetzer, the executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, the elite evangelical school outside of Chicago, told me. She earned speaking slots at big-name churches, including Hillsong and Saddleback, whose pastor, Rick Warren, calls her a dear friend. He needed his hair brushed!”īy the late ’90s, women were packing sports arenas to hear Moore tell this and other parables.
The Lord knows what our need is, Moore says.
What began as a comic set piece ends as a moving testament to faith and the power of intimate acts of kindness. Moore describes her embarrassment, recounting her inner dialogue with God, in which she tries to talk her way out of the divine directive. Suddenly, she feels called by God to brush the man’s hair-not to bear witness to him, or even help him board his plane, but to smooth his tangled locks. In one of her most famous talks, Moore describes an encounter with a haggard, elderly man in an airport terminal. As charismatic as her male peers, she was also earnest and charmingly self-deprecating. To them, she was a revelation: a petite bottle blonde from Arkadelphia, Arkansas, who could talk seriously about Jesus one moment and the impossibility of finding decent child care the next.
Moore’s audience seemed to be starved for a teacher who understood their lives. In tiny church social halls, she laid the cornerstone of an evangelical empire. Slowly, she started getting invitations to speak at women’s luncheons and study groups, in exchange for a plate of food or a potted plant. Moore kicked her way into ministry, choreographing routines to contemporary Christian music for the women of Houston’s First Baptist Church.Īt the time, most Texas seminaries weren’t offering the kind of instruction she sought, so Moore found a private tutor. So she went where many women in Texas were going in the ’80s: aerobics class. But Moore was resolute: God, she felt, had called her to serve. In some congregations, women could not speak from the lectern on a Sunday or even read the Bible in front of men. Many conservative Christian denominations believed that women should not hold authority over men, whether in church or at home many denominations still believe this. When Beth Moore arrived in Houston in the 1980s, she found few models for young women who wanted to teach scripture.
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