Beth Moore is a Bible teacher with a speaking ministry that’s taken her across the nation, challenging thousands of people. She has written multiple best-selling books and Bible studies. Her latest, co-authored with her daughter, Melissa, is “Now That Faith Has Come: A Study of Galatians.” Beth lives in Houston, Texas, where she leads Living Proof Ministries and enjoys life with her husband, Keith.
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Key Questions for Beth Moore
-How did writing a study on Galatians impact you personally?
-Earlier this year, you left the Southern Baptist Convention. What was that like for you?
-What advice would you give to people who are staying in denominations they find difficult?
-What gospel hope does Galatians offer to people bearing the weight of the law?
Key Quotes from Beth Moore
“Most writers would say that the pandemic made it extremely hard to write. You would think we were all home and it should have been the easiest thing. It’s not true. It was so burdensome, so, so worrisome.”
“Where I landed was true to my convictions in Christ as I understand the Word and as I seek in a very wobbly way to walk with the Lord Jesus day to day. But in the midst of those things, will I get a ton of things wrong? Yes, absolutely I will. But where I felt like I was landing on some of these things, Galatians was very affirming and it was like, stand and don’t let go and don’t back off.”
“You can tell a tree by its fruit, not by its mouth, but its fruit.”
“When you’ve known of Jesus all your life, began to know him in childhood, for me, it was around nine…I’m just not bailing this late.”
“In a church world where not once…had they, the victims and survivors been put first, to just put them first. It’s not that it wasn’t costly and that I couldn’t regard the cost…but I’m simply saying that to me, it was like, you know what? They have never once been put first in these conversations where their lives were deeply, deeply cut and brutalized and scarred.”
“I had this argument with a number of guys from [the SBC] world…I said a couple of times I loved the SBC more than you did and you know, I’ll sort of stand with that. And by that, I mean I fought so hard because it was like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, this is not who we are. This is not who we are. This is not what I was taught as a young servant.’”
“It has been like a death. I loved the SBC. It was my whole heritage.”
“[My decision to leave the SBC] was not a loss of love. It was a loss of belonging. It was facing up to the fact that somehow, I no longer belong. And, you know, it began instantly with speaking out back in the fall of 2016. It was overnight.”
“I felt like this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, it was to me it’s the dumbest thing. It’s when I stupidly said something online to somebody else about speaking on Mother’s Day, at my church. And you know, I would have known that it would have annoyed somebody. But that’s not what happened. It dropped like a bomb.”
“I felt that many bore false witness because it was, it sounded like, ‘She’s led the women astray.’…You know me better than this.’”
“You know, I have never tried to be a senior pastor. I have never been a minister at a church. My payroll experience at First Baptist was teaching aerobics…It wasn’t true. And it was very widespread and it broke my heart.”
“Two years before I did step away, people were going, ‘Why do you stay?’ And they would just say openly…’So many of them hate you. Why do you stay?’ And I was like, ‘You know, I just I had not been led of the Spirit to do that. I just said no, I was going to stay and fight for it.”
“I didn’t step out a moment before I felt like God went, ‘Go.’ And…sometimes you leave because you love a people….and sometimes it is an act of protest.”
“This is not the SBC that I knew. This is not what I had believed. I believed, and I believed a lot of you, and I believed your motive was pure toward issues, for instance, in regard to women, I thought this was all about Scripture, and it proved not to always be all about Scripture.”
“We don’t just leave. We’re not consumers in the church. We stay, we invest our lives in it. We work through conflict. If we’re there long enough, we probably work through a couple of different pastors that have shepherded that congregation. Maybe we liked one better than we like the other. But we stay. We invest our lives. There comes a time, though, that we have to be very awake to the leadership of the Spirit. When is it time to go?”
“One of the things that has concerned me most was believing that there was an extremely hard pull to the far right where there was going to be less and less for women to do…that the only thing a woman really was called to do that was blessed by God in the church was in the context of the traditional family. And I don’t know what that does. I love the family. I love my role as wife. I love my role as mother. But I’m going to ask you, what in the world are you going to do with 10,000 single men and women?”
“[God] really does have a plan. He really does know what he’s called you to. He really is going to walk you through. Not instantly, but we’re on a journey with him. We’re walking in the Spirit with Christ, and he is going to lead you to what he has called you to do. And so you persevere. This is what we do. We are in this thing and we endure.”
This article originally appeared here.