Last week, Bible teacher, conference speaker, and the leader of Revive Our Hearts ministry, Nancy Leigh DeMoss announced that she will marry Robert Wolgemuth this coming fall. Given both DeMoss and Wolgemuth’s very public personae—he is a former president of Thomas Nelson, once chairman of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, and owner of the literary agency Wolgemuth and Associates—their ensuing marriage is the closest thing evangelicalism has to a royal wedding.
Naturally, there is a lot of supposition about how marriage will change them, but both DeMoss and Wolgemuth have been clear about one crucial principle: their call to marry does not negate or replace their individual calls to ministry.
The call to marriage
DeMoss and Wolgemuth’s belief, articulated in the announcement, that God will make them “even more spiritually fruitful together than [they] could be apart” is not unusual in evangelical circles. One of the distinctives of the Protestant Reformation is, after all, the conviction that those called to ministry can (and often are) also called to marriage.
Still, the relationship between marriage and ministry continues to be a sticky one, especially for women. As if anticipating the question, DeMoss quickly assured her audience that she has no intention of stepping away from ministry:
I love this man dearly and look forward to becoming Mrs. Robert Wolgemuth. But my life mission has not changed. It will now be our life mission to magnify the Lord together … We envision a continued robust Revive Our Hearts ministry. Our longing is for even more women (and men) around the world to experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.
Given her vocal embrace of singleness in the past, it’s natural for DeMoss to feel the need to reaffirm her call to ministry. If singleness was a gift that enabled her to fully commit herself to the work of Revive Our Hearts, then any change in her marital status will require some explanation. At the same time, DeMoss’ commitment to public ministry may surprise some because she has also been an outspoken advocate for women to embrace a unique call to home and family. An unabashed critic of feminism, DeMoss warns women against attempting to “do it all.” While she stops short of criticizing women who work outside the home, she does encourage married women to prioritize their husbands and children as a primary means of ministry.
The call to home and ministry
Some of this disconnect is explained by our cultural assumptions about who bears responsibility for the work of the home and who bears responsibility for the work of the church. Since the Industrial Revolution, the marketplace and home have become distinct realms of existence with women traditionally finding their place in the home while men venture into the marketplace to “bring home the bacon.” With this divide in place, church ministry increasingly assumed a quasi-marketplace identity; today, ministry is often understood as a profession with its own set of educational requirements and financial rewards. Because of this, many understand the call to ministry and the call to home as competing calls. If a woman’s place is “in the home,” then how could it also be in the church? Thankfully, in the digital age, the divide between the home and marketplace is shrinking and with it the unnatural divide between public gifting and family. If it’s true that we have unhelpfully associated ministry with the marketplace, perhaps a more holistic engagement between the home and marketplace will lead to a more holistic engagement between home and the call to formal ministry. Perhaps we will begin to see both home and ministry as part of a larger call entirely: to extend the glory of God throughout the whole earth.
Partners in the gospel
In Scripture, both men and women carrying out leadership and service in the local church can be disqualified on the basis of their ministry at home. In other words, the Bible does not support a separation between the call to minister to family and the call to minister publicly. If any of us fail to love and serve our closest neighbors—those within our four walls—we cannot be trusted to love and serve those outside them, either.
Still, the apostle Paul is clear that marriage can present a distraction, or a limitation, to our participation in more formal ministry. Women like DeMoss who believe they are called to both marriage and ministry should expect to experience very real constraints on their time and emotion. Yet these calls do not negate each other. As 19th-century pastor, theologian, and statesman, Abraham Kuyper notes in his biographical sketch of Priscilla, who aided Paul in his ministry:
A woman such as Priscilla is a potent influence in any congregation to which she happens to belong … From her position in the Word of God, she affirms that a woman, also a married woman, has another calling besides those of dispatching daily duties and engaging in activities of mercy …
Such a holistic vision of ministry and family may feel unattainable, and in some sense, it is. The tension between our callings is an innate part of human limitation and no number of spreadsheets, calendars, or new models of efficiency can resolve it. But this is also the beauty of multiple callings. The Holy Spirit calls us to attempt the undoable precisely to make us dependent on his power and leading.
Like every newlywed couple, DeMoss and Woglemuth will soon experience the joy and struggle of merging two lives into one. Through God’s grace, they will learn to minister to one another even as they continue to minister to the church at large. But as they do—and as we get to watch from a distance—we may just catch a glimpse of a marriage not unlike that of Priscilla and Aquila. A marriage where two people are bound together by something greater than their own home and family: the glory of the gospel.
Hannah Anderson is a freelance writer, blogger, and author of Made for More: An Invitation to Live God's Image. She lives with her husband and three children in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. You can connect with her at her blog sometimesalight.com, or on Twitter @sometimesalight.
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