Jen Wilkin. It’s a name you may have known for a long time. It may be a new one you were recently acquainted with due to her remarks regarding mandatory Bible reading in Texas public school classrooms, which briefly took Christian social media by storm.

But there’s a lot more to Jen Wilkin than meets the eye. Over the last 15 years, she’s become a popular Christian author and speaker whose books and Bible studies are used by hundreds of Southern Baptist churches (and churches in other denominations) across the U.S. 

Yet, at the same time, Jen’s positions on a variety of biblical and social issues have stirred up a tempest of controversy, which discerning churches and individuals should be aware of.

Who Is Jen Wilkin?

Jen Wilkin is an author, podcaster, conference speaker, discipleship instructor, and trainer of pastors. She is platformed as a featured author, speaker, and podcaster by Lifeway Women and The Gospel Coalition, and is a columnist at Christianity Today, where she writes articles regularly.

She used to hold a staff position at Matt Chandler’s Village Church, and her partnership with him/presence at his church helped turn her into a “popular Bible teacher” and land her resources on countless church bookstalls across the country. 

Jen’s older books and Bible study materials have a reputation for being generally doctrinally sound. Her first book, Women of the Word, was instantly popular with women’s ministries everywhere, and she soon became the “go-to” women’s Bible study author for many churches.

In more recent years, however, several issues have arisen with Jen and her teaching that discerning Southern Baptists, particularly pastors, must reckon with as they seek to fulfill their Titus 1:9 mandate to “give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it,” and to protect the precious women of their churches from those who would lead them astray.

As I will endeavor to dispassionately demonstrate in this article, Wilkin is not the complementarian that she claims to be. As Amy Simmons has helpfully summarized in her excellent article warning about Wilkin’s teaching and trajectory, it appears that Wilkin 1) operates out of an “egalitarian ministry philosophy”; 2) holds a “feminist view of gender roles”; and 3) demands pastoral “deference to the ‘den mother’ authority figure” in the church. These are well-stated warning flags that I agree with, and I will offer similar critiques with a few different emphases.

But to help set the stage for this conversation, we need to first consider why subtly subversive less-than-complementarian teachings are such a major issue in our current cultural moment—a moment rife with more than just feminism, egalitarianism, and androgyny making headway in the church, but full-blown transgenderism as well.

Complementarianism Under Fire

If there was any doubt that the biblical doctrine of male headship (Eph. 5:23) and male-only pastors (1 Timothy 3:1-7; Titus 1:6-7) is under fire, consider that the SBC has been “debating the existence of women pastors” (which don’t exist) for over five years now and still has not yet been able to definitively reaffirm its commitment to male-only pastors through the passage of the Law Amendment, and now the Truth & Unity Amendment. We will see what Indianapolis holds.

Throughout the years of this debate in America’s largest conservative Protestant denomination, we have seen megachurch pastor Rick Warren defend women pastors, Jason Paredes at Fielder Church proclaim that his church “unwaveringly, unequivocally, gratefully” has female pastors (though after initially renaming their female pastors to “shepherds,” Fielder has since dropped the shepherd title for women, but with no public indication they have changed their theology on the issue). 

And those are just two examples. 

A documentary released right before the SBC annual meeting in June highlighted dozens more. And a report published in June of 2023 found that there were at least 1,800 female pastors across the SBC. There is little question that complementarianism is facing the “moment of reckoning” that 9 Marks warned about back in 2019. What is still in question is how well complementarianism is going to face this reckoning.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when 9 Marks released their journal on this topic, Jonathan Leeman began the series by highlighting a variety of social media posts by another popular Bible teacher—Beth Moore. 

Beth Moore’s trajectory from an SBC darling to an openly and proudly egalitarian Anglican is not the point of this piece. But for those who know what her trajectory entailed, she remains a cautionary tale. 

Furthermore, Beth Moore is a name that must be mentioned before addressing Jen Wilkin, because in 2013, Jen Wilkin published a blog post, “The Next Beth Moore,” where Wilkin lavishes praise on Moore and says, in her own words, that she is “always mindful of the debt I and so many others owe her.” She closes this post, which is worth reading in full, by exhorting other women “Bible teachers” to “Work tirelessly to eliminate the possibility of another Beth Moore. Sisters, don’t look to replace her voice: look to replicate her vision. Let us commit that no one voice will ever again be as loud because the need will never again be as great.”

Another person of interest that Jonathan Leeman highlights in his series, someone who serves as an example of a “narrow” complementarianism that “shies away” from highlighting the creation-order design differences between men and women (this is fundamentally a more liberal vision for complementarianism, and can also be understood as a “soft egalitarianism”), is Jen Wilkin’s current podcast co-host, Kyle Worley. 

Leeman rightly raises his eyebrows at Worley’s social media post from 2019 in which he proclaims that “I have over 200 hours in graduate theological education and in that time I never had a single female professor. Not one. There is no biblical case to be made for not encouraging/inviting qualified women to teach and train students and pastors in seminary contexts. Please @ me.”

This background matters. Jen Wilkin’s effusive praise for Beth Moore matters. Kyle Worley’s desire to see women seminary professors teaching men—future pastors—theology matters. As the old saying goes: “Show me your friends, and I will show you your future.” 

And Leeman recognizing that the way in which Wilkin “pushes hard at programmatizing female leadership in the church without necessarily defining the nature of that leadership” falls into the narrow complementarianism vision back in 2019 matters. 

The so-called “complementarianism” of Beth Moore became full-blown egalitarianism. The narrow complementarianism of those in this same stream is quickly becoming soft-egalitarianism. 

And I, like Jonathan Leeman, believe that “the egalitarian and androgynous push of the last several decades is a front-burner, generationally urgent issue for the church, and anyone who denies this is naïve. Our culture’s assault on gender differences and authority is generationally urgent because it’s unique to this Western moment, this time and place. This is our battle, and if you cannot see that, I believe you are more affected by our time and place than you realize.” 

This is our battle. It’s a battle for biblical fidelity and holy and happy submission to the totality of God’s Word for the life of His church. 

And in this battle, we need to be honest about who is calling the church to a courageous defense of God’s good design for men and women, and who is issuing a siren song of compromise that leads—perhaps subtly at first but clearly in its trajectory—further and further away from sound doctrine.

My concern, which I have held for years and voiced about Jen Wilkin before, is that her vision for men and women in the church is, fundamentally, an unchristian and unbiblical vision that both simultaneously 1) downplays the very real design differences between men and women (she has a faulty Christian anthropology and, by extension, a faulty teleology for men and women in the church); and 2) overstates what women in the church should aspire to in terms of public teaching and leadership, effectively exhorting women to rebelliously pursue roles and opportunities that God has reserved for men and only men in the life of the local church. 

Allow me to provide three examples.

First, Jen Wilkin Explicitly Teaches Men

Though Jen vociferously insists she is a complementarian, she does not use the traditional, established definition of that term. When the term “complementarian” first began to be widely used, it was essentially a catch-all label for the biblical role of women in the home and the church: wives are to submit to their husbands’ leadership, and, in the gathering of the church, women are not to preach, teach, or hold authority over men, or hold the office of pastor.

Soon after the term “complementarian” came into common evangelical parlance, we began to hear the terms “soft” or “narrow” complementarianism. This was the view that women could perform any function in the church (including preaching, teaching co-ed adult classes, etc.) and hold any office or position in the church except the office of “senior pastor”.

Today, Jen and most others who hold that belief no longer call themselves “soft” or “narrow” complementarians. They have dropped the “soft” or “narrow” and simply call themselves “complementarians.” This is how Jen can simultaneously claim to be a complementarian while also continuing to teach and preach to men.

Early on, Jen rarely discussed her position on the role of women in the church except to declare that she was a complementarian and that, biblically, women could not hold the office of pastor. As the years have gone by, however, she has followed in the footsteps of other egalitarian teachers (such as Beth Moore) by more candidly expressing her increasingly egalitarian views and openly promoting speaking engagements where she teaches co-ed and male audiences.

One example of Jen transparently distancing herself from the traditional complementarian position was The Gospel Coalition’s October 2024 podcast episode, “How Men and Women Must Labor Together for the Good of the Church.” The episode dealt primarily with leadership dynamics between pastors and women, and among other remarks from Jen, this comment was telling:

“Our theological reality is that a non-elder male is in the same space as a female in the local church, and so there should be access for a woman in the same way that there would be for any non-elder male.”

This claim is neither theologically accurate nor biblically sound, and it reveals the bedrock of Jen’s unbiblical anthropology of manhood and womanhood.

Even among the laity, men and women are neither interchangeable nor equivalent. God created men and women ontologically unique and discrete. It’s not just that we carry out different external tasks in the church. Men and women are fearfully and wonderfully made qualitatively different all the way down to our DNA, to the very core of our being.

Men, in literally every fiber of their being, were carefully crafted and designed by God to lead the foundational institutions He established: the family, the church, and the government. Women were not. In the local church, this means that a man who is teaching a men’s Bible study class and a woman who is teaching a women’s Bible study class are still not on equal footing, as Jen claims, because the man is still imbued with the mantle of leadership God knits into all men at conception, whether or not it is currently being utilized by his local church. 

And if it were to be utilized, the man, through no effort on his part, but by God’s divine decree, meets the very first requirement for eldership that a woman, through every effort on her part, could never achieve: The qualification that an elder must be a man.

The proper “theological reality” is that a non-elder male is a potential elder, while a female is not and never can be. Therefore, “access” in the church for non-elder men vs. women to pastoral training, teaching, and intentional discipleship from the pastors should (in fact must) reflect this.

The foundation of Jen’s understanding of manhood and womanhood is not a biblical foundation, but an egalitarian foundation. Naturally, an egalitarian foundation will bear increasingly egalitarian fruit.

We know, according to the text and context of 1 Timothy 2:11-3:7 (and the preponderance of Scripture), that, in the gathering of the Body of Christ, the church, God prohibits women from teaching men (which includes preaching to men), exercising authority over men, and holding the office of pastor/elder/overseer. Violation of this command is a sin.

I often find it necessary to explain to women who are new Christians that “the church” is not the building in which we meet; it is the people. When Christians are gathered for the purpose of worship, the preaching and teaching of the Word, etc., we are the church, regardless of what sort of building we’re meeting in, which day of the week it is, and whether we call it a worship service, conference, workshop, etc., and God’s prohibition of women teaching and exercising authority over men applies.

Over the years, Jen has taught and preached to men (co-ed audiences) – and continues to sin in this way – on many occasions in various venues. Just a few examples include:

• Jen has been featured as a speaker multiple times at The Gospel Coalition’s national conference (which is co-ed, not to be confused with TGCW, TGC’s annual women’s conference) at least as far back as 2017. (In the opening seconds of this 2017 TGC conference session, Why It’s Good that God Is Different from Us, Jen acknowledges and welcomes the men in her audience).
• In 2018, the ERLC, Southern Seminary (SBTS), and The Village Church co-hosted The Gospel & The Future of the Church, the pre-conference to the 2018 Southern Baptist Convention. Jen was a keynote speaker.
• Later in 2018, Jen was a keynote speaker at the ERLC’s The Cross-Shaped Family conference.
• Jen has preached in the chapel for Oklahoma Baptist University and at Dallas Theological Seminary’s chapel service on more than one occasion.
• Jen’s conference brand at Lifeway Women is In the Word with Jen Wilkin. She is slated to headline six of these conferences in 2026, which Lifeway says “men are more than welcome to attend.”

Jen also takes part in training pastors and other (male) ministry leaders:

• At the 2017 Acts 29 “Advance the Church” conference, Jen taught pastors and church planters on the subject of Women in Church Planting: Understanding women as central to the mission.
• Starting in January 2026, Jen began serving as a “Coach” in Gospel Centered Discipleship’s “Preaching Cohort.” She, along with other coaches, instructs pastors “on the calling and craft of preaching.”
• In May 2026, Jen was a keynote speaker at Biola University’s Anchored: A Conference for Pastors, Church Leaders, and the Community (presented by the Talbot School of Theology).
• Jen co-teaches the Training the Church Cohort, an online course “helping church teams recover a biblical vision for discipleship and implement it across every ministry area.” It is  “trusted by hundreds of pastors and leaders.”

In addition to Jen’s continuing sin of training pastors, one is left to wonder why any pastor training organization would hire someone who is unqualified to be a pastor, and with zero experience as a pastor, to train pastors? I certainly would not want my doctor trained by someone who is unqualified to be a doctor and who has zero experience as a doctor.

Second, Jen Wilkin Partners with both False and Biblically Problematic Teachers

Sadly, many Christians do not understand why it is sinful and dangerous for a pastor or Christian teacher to yoke or affiliate with false or doctrinally unsound teachers, and they flippantly dismiss this serious biblical issue as “guilt by association.”

It is true that “bad company corrupts good morals” (1 Corinthians 15:33). Human beings influence the people with whom we keep company. The good apple in the barrel never restores the bad apples; rather, the bad apples spoil the good one. 

This is why we don’t want our children befriending the kid at school who’s constantly in the principal’s office and why we shouldn’t want those we trust to teach the members of our churches, whether in person, on video, or via their materials, keeping company with false teachers and being influenced by them.

But in addition to that, rejecting false teachers is commanded by God throughout Scripture. (And there’s no exception for joining with false teachers as long as you, personally, are a doctrinally sound teacher who will be teaching sound doctrine. Scripture simply says, “don’t”. Period.) When a teacher keeps company and joins in ministry with false and biblically problematic teachers, she’s demonstrating two very alarming things:

1. She is disobeying God’s commands, whether out of ignorance of those commands or in willful defiance of them.
2. She is either so undiscerning or so ignorant of Scripture that she doesn’t know what constitutes sound and false doctrine.

Ignorance. Lack of discernment. Defiance. Disobedience. None of these are qualities we want to see in those who teach our church members or who create the content and materials we use in our churches.

A few occasions in which Jen has unbiblically yoked with false or biblically problematic teachers:

• As mentioned above, in 2013, Jen wrote a blog post entitled, The Next Beth Moore, in which she spoke glowingly of Beth Moore, her teaching, and one of her books. She has also had several friendly and/or affirming interactions with Beth on X, and has pointed women to Beth’s writing. In March 2021, when Beth cut ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, Jen offered this heartfelt farewell.
• Jen has appeared on the IF: Gathering podcast with Jennie Allen, and has written a devotional for Lysa TerKeurst’s Proverbs 31 blog.
• During LifeWay’s 2018 Abundance conferences, Jen appeared alongside Lisa Harper, Raechel Myers, Amanda Bible Williams, Christine Caine, Jennie Allen, Kelly Minter, Whitney Capps (of Lysa TerKeurst’s Proverbs 31 Ministries), and others.
• In August 2020, Jen appeared at LifeWay Women Live with Beth Moore, Priscilla Shirer, Jackie Hill Perry, Kelly Minter, Angie Smith, Jennifer Rothschild, and Kristi McLelland.
• In recent years, Jen has been more closely associated with what I call “The Gospel Coalition Camp” or “progressive lite”. Whether actually connected to TGC or not, individuals in this camp tend to be woke, soft on homosexuality, subscribe to the functional egalitarianism Jen calls “complementarian,” and have social justice tendencies. Jen was one of the keynote speakers at TGC’s women’s conferences TGCW21, TGCW22, TGCW24, and TGCW26. As mentioned earlier, she also spoke at TGC17, TGC23, and TGC25, the TGC national conference, which is co-ed.

Third, Jen Wilkin’s Teachings Conflict with Scripture

We’ve already seen that Jen’s behavior sinfully conflicts with Scripture when she teaches men and yokes with false teachers. But these behaviors also teach something that is in conflict with Scripture.

When Jen stands up to teach a co-ed audience or joins false teachers on the stage, her behavior is teaching her audience, all of her followers, and everyone who uses her materials that if they come to a command of Scripture they don’t like, such as 1 Timothy 2:12 or Romans 16:17-18, they are free to ignore and disobey that command just like she does. This is false doctrine of the most foundational sort.

Imagine your pastor standing up Sunday morning to preach and saying, “If you come across a command of Scripture you don’t like, it’s OK to ignore it and disobey it.” It makes my head swim to think how quickly your elders or deacons would bodily drag him out of the pulpit and your personnel committee would fire him.

Yet, unfortunately, most Southern Baptist churches are inadvertently teaching this false doctrine to their women by choosing Bible studies authored by and conferences featuring Jen and others like her (including most of Lifeway Women’s platformed authors and speakers).

Another odd, and rather grotesque, instance of Jen’s unbiblical teaching occurred at the aforementioned 2017 Acts 29 “Advance the Church” conference. Unfortunately, the video of Jen’s full teaching session at that conference has been scrubbed from the internet (though, to my knowledge, Jen has never addressed or repented of this teaching), and only a partial video remains.

But from what was preserved, we can see Jen teaching a room full of pastors and church planters the following:

I want you to think for a second about what the implications might be about the way that women understand the gospel as a result of being embodied females. And I apologize if this makes you uncomfortable. Women’s bodies, every 28 days, tell them a parable about the shedding of blood for the renewing of life. You don’t think that changes the way that we encounter the Scriptures?

This was not only a private and potentially uncomfortable subject to address in public – especially for an audience of men – it’s a patently ridiculous and untrue teaching. Menstruation teaches us nothing about the gospel. The two subjects are completely unrelated. Additionally, aside from Jen, I’ve never – prior to or after this teaching – heard a single woman say her period helped her better understand the shedding of Christ’s blood.

We do not look to menstruation to increase our understanding of the gospel. We look to the Word of God.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Christian women do not need a celebrity Bible study author or teacher who disobeys Scripture and teaches them unbiblical doctrines. Christian women need the preaching and teaching of their doctrinally sound pastors and teachers. 

They need godly, older Titus 2 women in their churches who will disciple them to Christlikeness with the rightly handled Word of truth. They need to systematically study the living and active Word itself, for only God’s Word can supernaturally transform them to greater Christlikeness.

For years, Jen Wilkin has displayed an increasingly obvious pattern of troubling teaching, troubling associations, and a troubling trajectory. More could be said, and this was not intended to serve as an “exhaustive resource” but rather a warning, from one committed complementarian Southern Baptist woman to the rest of our denomination and indeed the “watching world.”

I have no doubt that this article will prompt a barrage of her supporters to rush to her defense. It was no different when those of us who could see where Beth Moore was heading pointed that out and warned about it before others could see it for themselves. I do have some hope that the warning signs for Wilkin will be more readily recognized and received. In fact, last spring we saw SBTS quickly pull a public photo of resource recommendations “honoring godly women who have served the church,” which featured a book authored by Jen Wilkin.

That was a good sign. But more must be said, and more must be done.

Now is not the time to play footsie with the narrow complementarianism that is really a soft egalitarianism that will soon be a firm egalitarianism. The fruit is contained with the seed and seen in the flower as it begins to bloom.

If Jen Wilkin cannot understand the differences between God’s creation order design for men and women and how those designs and corresponding duties and opportunities are manifest in the life of the local church, and if she continues to insist on teaching men, and pushing more and more churches to defer to women in pseudo-elder roles, we can rightly discern where her project will ultimately end.

And, to that, I have to agree with Jen Wilkin: We don’t need any more Beth Moores in the SBC. One was more than enough.