Beth Moore: Jesus Is My ‘Whole Life’
Because she’s “been with Jesus so long” and witnessed his trustworthiness and faithfulness, Beth Moore says, it “wouldn’t matter who told me to ‘go home.’” She calls Jesus her “whole life,” saying she has “a one-track mind” for him and is “with him to the death.” That’s why when people thank Moore for not quitting, she responds, “It never occurs to me to quit!” The only thing that occurs to her, she says, is to “leave the public eye.”
By 2016, Moore says, she “had dealt with so much trash,” which was making her life much harder than it needed to be. That fall, when the Donald Trump “Access Hollywood” tape was released, Moore says her eyes were opened to gender disparities. As SBC leaders responded with “rationalizations and excuses” rather than “shock and awe,” she says, “the fog cleared, and I saw the sexism and misogyny” and “everything became suspect.”
Moore realized she was “watching a severe pull [in the SBC] to the far conservative side—beyond that into fundamentalism.” And the “train wreck” wasn’t coming just from the “old guard,” she says, but from SBC seminaries as well. Whereas she once thought certain denominational teachings were “about Scripture,” now she discovered “it was so blatantly about power.”
Beth Moore Calls Leaving the SBC an ‘Act of Protest’
“I had to leave the SBC,” Moore says, because “I no longer felt that I belonged or was wanted.” She adds, “I was in so far, I saw things that were so objectionable regarding sexism and racism.” Those two things go “hand in hand,” she says, because the issue is “power.”
Leaving the denomination was both “an act of protest” and “an act of obedience to the Lord,” says Moore. She hopes her nasty “divorce” from the SBC and all the publicity surrounding it will help “change the climate” for young women in the future. Noting that the Holy Spirit was poured out onto sons and daughters (Acts 2:17), Moore says, “I will fight to the death for my little sisters to have a place to serve in the gospel witness.”
At her new church, which Moore declines to name, “Christ is as exalted as I’ve ever seen anywhere.” Plus, “there’s not that weirdness” about women’s roles, she says. In the congregation of about 150 people, women can do everything but be senior pastor.
Moore says she’s weary of labels (including complementarianism) and “so over crowds.” Although she still speaks at large events, she says, “I just wanna serve Jesus and then die and go to heaven!”
Despite Life’s Storms, Jesus ‘Gives Me Joy,’ Says Beth Moore
MacArthur’s “go home” comment didn’t really bother her, Moore reveals, because her ministry had always been intentionally interdenominational. Instead, “what killed me,” she says, is when SBC leaders labeled her as “the biggest threat” to the denomination. “This was my world,” she says. “These were my people.” SBC leaders knew she wasn’t “after the pulpits,” she says, adding that the entire conflict was “so overblown.”
