Almost 20 years ago, Nancy Guthrie sat on the deck of a cruise ship, reading Collin Hansen’s book Young, Restless, Reformed. It chronicled the rising interest in Reformed theology bubbling up in places like The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Together for the Gospel conferences, and Bethlehem Baptist Church.
Nancy was fascinated. She was no stranger to influential Christians—she was married to a vice president at the prominent Word Music and had spent her entire career in media relations for Christian publishing companies and well-known evangelical authors such as Kay Arthur and Anne Graham Lotz. From her vantage point, she’d begun to see the same movement Collin did.
“I wrote Collin a letter,” Nancy said. “I told him a lot of things about the book—how interesting it was. But I had a question for him: Where are the women?”
In 2008, the majority of evangelical women’s ministries were dominated by celebrity personalities, funny stories, and emotional affirmation. There was little scriptural exposition. The Gospel Coalition’s first women’s conference was still four years away. Jen Wilkin’s first book, Women of the Word, wouldn’t come out until 2014. Jackie Hill Perry hadn’t yet come to Christ.
Still, Nancy wasn’t sure she should send Collin the letter. She’d never met him, and she didn’t want to come across as forward or pushy. She decided against it.
“I was just becoming familiar with the Reformed world,” she said.
Nancy had grown up Southern Baptist. She was interested in theology and served with her husband in their local church. But as she juggled staying home with her toddler and running her own business, she struggled to read her Bible and feel close to God. In desperation, she signed up for Bible Study Fellowship (BSF).
“Being in the Word regularly changed my life,” she said.
In 1998, Nancy gave birth to a daughter who was soon diagnosed with Zellweger Syndrome. Little Hope, and then her brother Gabe, would die before their first birthdays.
Their loss was devastating, and it sent Nancy into a deeper search of Scripture and the theology of God’s sovereignty in suffering, which she found in the Reformed writings. By the time she picked up Young, Restless, Reformed, she’d experienced her own Reformed resurgence.
“I wanted to find my sisters,” she said. “If there were women who were teaching and speaking in this vein, I wanted to know them.”
Soon after, Nancy connected with Kathleen Nielson, who would become TGC’s first director of women’s initiatives. When four women breakout speakers were included in the 2011 TGC conference, Nancy was one of them.
“I was thrilled to get to be part of that,” she said. “I really had a sense that I had found my people.”
She had. And over the next 15 years, her group of people would multiply. Women all over the world—many taught, encouraged, or led by Nancy—started to dig into the Bible not just with their hearts but with their minds.
Seriously Southern Baptist
Nancy Guthrie was born in 1962, into a country where nearly everybody claimed to be a Christian (93 percent), almost three-quarters were members of a congregation (73 percent), and nearly half had been to worship services in the last week (46 percent).
Nancy Guthrie (née Jinks) heading to Gashland Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1966 / Courtesy of Nancy Guthrie
“I’d say I came from a Southern Baptist family, but that wouldn’t quite capture it,” she said. “It was serious Southern Baptist. . . . We were a family who was in church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and sometimes on Saturday to clean the church. We were always there.”
Nancy didn’t mind. In seventh grade, while working at the summer camp for the Kansas City offshoot of Youth for Christ (KCYFC), she made a commitment to live for Christ. By the next year, she was sharing her testimony with local KCYFC clubs. On the weekends, she sang at KCYFC rallies and on Sunday-morning television.
“Youth for Christ became my home,” she said. Nancy was at the beginning of a new categorization of ministry—youth ministry. Over the next few years, the parachurch attention to adolescents would be adopted by churches as they hired youth pastors and formed youth groups.
At the same time, another category of ministry was developing.
Women’s Ministry
Before the 1970s, if a group of women gathered at church, it was probably to talk about how to raise money for missionaries, care for the needy in the community, or fundraise for a new organ.
But by the early 1980s, women were asking for something else. The first well-known women’s Bible studies—pioneered by Audrey Wetherell Johnson’s BSF in the 1960s and Kay Arthur’s Precept Ministries in the 1970s—were both inductive. Women worked through one book of Scripture at a time, asking, What does the text say? What does it mean? How can I apply it to my life?
This rising intellectual interest in the Bible corresponded with a growing number of women enrolling in college, earning degrees, and joining the white-collar workforce in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.
Nancy singing with JoySong, a singing group at John Brown University, in 1983 / Courtesy of Nancy Guthrie
It also corresponded with a rise in Christian media and publishing. In the wake of the Jesus Movement, Christian bookstores were popping up all across the country. Christianity Today magazine was busy adding monthly publications—10 in 18 years. Publishers such as Word, Thomas Nelson, Tyndale, Zondervan, and later Crossway saw massive sales, particularly in Bible translations. And Word Records and Word Music were churning out contemporary Christian albums, books, and church music.
It was a heady time to be an evangelical in America—especially if you were young, were female, and loved Christian music and book publishing.
Nancy was all three, plus outgoing, high energy, and quick to raise her hand. During her years at John Brown University, she was the student activity coordinator (which included setting up concerts on campus with the big Christian artists of the day), hosted a radio show on the campus station, and sang with a college traveling group.
Right after college, she landed a job she felt made for—as a publicist for Word’s book-publishing division.
Word
“At that time, Word would have the majority of the top 10 books on the bestseller list—Billy Graham, Chuck Swindoll, James Dobson, and later Max Lucado,” she said. “I was immediately reading these books and working with these authors. . . . In some cases, it was thrilling. And in some cases, it was hugely disappointing.”
Here, in the epicenter of a booming evangelicalism, was evidence of true faith—generosity, joy, and gentleness. But there was also sin—greed, pride, a lack of integrity. Soon after Nancy started the job, one of the company leaders began an affair with one of the authors.
“It was such an education for me,” Nancy said.
Nancy and David were married in 1986 at Woodway Baptist Church in Waco, Texas / Courtesy of Nancy Guthrie
After a year at Word, “a guy named David Guthrie was hired to do marketing for the print music part of the company,” Nancy said. “His office was down the hall from mine.”
David had a heavy beard and looked serious, but underneath was dry wit. Nancy kept finding excuses to go down past his office. A year later, they were married, and three years later, she was pregnant.
When Matt was born in 1990, Nancy wanted to stay home with him, so she quit her office job at Word. But she also wanted to work, so she bought a fax machine and a Macintosh Classic computer and started her own media relations business. Her biggest client was the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA), the trade association for Christian bookstores.
When CBA was formed in 1950, it had about 300 evangelical retail stores to support. By the mid-1990s, there were 7,000. The $3 billion Christian retail business was moving thousands, sometimes millions, of copies of Billy Graham’s Just as I Am, the Left Behind series, and VeggieTales videos.
It kept Nancy racing to provide time-sensitive opportunities to authors and quotes to publications.
By the time she and David—then a vice president at Word Music—moved to Nashville in 1993, she was exhausted, physically stressed, and spiritually starving.
“At that point, I was so immersed in the Christian world and in theology, but I also felt like a huge hypocrite,” Nancy said. “I wasn’t really talking to God, and I wasn’t really reading his Word to hear from him.”
Into the Word
Still, when Nancy’s friend Sue Johnson invited her to the BSF class she was teaching in Nashville in 1994, Nancy was skeptical.
“I loved her, but I didn’t see her having the big teaching personality, like the kind of evangelical women I was working with,” Nancy said.
It was a high bar. As the economic opportunities within Christian retail expanded, so did the number of women’s devotionals, books, and conferences. While some focused on teaching Scripture (think Beth Moore or Anne Graham Lotz), the most prominent female personalities were the women speaking at Women of Faith conferences, charismatic authors such as Joyce Meyer, and those writing fiction (think Francine Rivers or Janette Oke) or producing music (think Amy Grant, Rebecca St. James, or CeCe Winans).
“Most publishing by and for women was topical, not Bible-study oriented,” Nancy said. “It was devotional or inspirational, but not theological.”
BSF was different. She still remembers her first session.
“Sue was teaching on the hemorrhaging woman, and she said that the life is in the blood,” Nancy remembers. “For this woman, the life was literally draining out of her. And she needed nothing less than a miracle to come alive to God.”
Nancy with Sue Johnson, her first BSF teacher / Courtesy of Nancy Guthrie
“Is there anyone here who thinks they need nothing less than a miracle to come alive?” Sue asked the women.
Nancy knew the question was rhetorical.
“You weren’t supposed to raise your hand, but in a sense, I wanted to,” she said. “I knew that was me. And I felt like I needed nothing less than a miracle to overcome this stony silence with God, a mountain of unconfessed sin and apathy.”
Nancy jumped into BSF.
“I was sitting in the front row, taking it in week by week, just watching Sue,” she said. “There was nothing flashy about her teaching. It was insightful and well put together, but it wasn’t about her big personality. And as I sat there, I realized how it was impacting me and all these women around me. I began to think, Wow. I can’t imagine doing anything more significant with my life than teaching the Bible.”
Nancy was also hearing the Word preached at church. She and David had wandered into Christ Presbyterian Church because they knew the choir director. Initially, they resisted the ideas about predestination, limited atonement, or infant baptism, but they did like the music and the preaching.
So they stayed.
Losing Hope
Nancy and David were thrilled when she became pregnant again—and even more thrilled to learn it would be a daughter. On November 23, 1998, Nancy gave birth to Hope Lauren Guthrie.
Right away, they noticed she had club feet and seemed lethargic.
Hope Lauren Guthrie in 1999 / Courtesy of Nancy Guthrie
“On [Hope’s] second day of life, this geneticist came to our room and told us he suspected she had Zellweger syndrome,” Nancy said. That meant she was missing a critical enzyme in every one of her cells.
Soon, it was confirmed.
“There had already been a lot of damage to all her major organs—liver, kidneys, brain,” Nancy said. There was no treatment. Hope’s life expectancy was six months.
The Guthries were numb with shock. It was five days before Nancy could look at the medical information the doctor had xeroxed from a medical textbook for them. She and David wondered what Hope’s life and death would be like, and who they would be on the other side of it.
For 199 days, they fed Hope, bathed her, sang to her, and prayed for her. They took her to church and baptized her.
Then one night, when David got up to change her diaper, Hope was cold.
“Handing over her body to the mortician was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Nancy said.
After the funeral, people began asking Nancy if she was going to write a book. At that point, she wasn’t interested. The Guthries were facing a bigger question: Would they have more children?
Losing Gabe
Both David and Nancy carry the recessive trait for Zellweger, which means any children have a 25 percent chance of having the fatal disorder.
“In some ways, if it was just David and me, we could take that chance,” she said. “We both loved and enjoyed Hope. But it wasn’t just us. Our son lived in a household waiting for his sibling to die for six months, and then in a household with a really sad mom, which could not have been much fun.”
They decided to take surgical steps to prevent another pregnancy. So they could hardly believe it when, a year and a half after Hope died, Nancy was pregnant.
“We were shocked and we were afraid,” she said. They had to wait eight weeks to do the prenatal testing, then another three weeks for the results.
“I was about 15 weeks pregnant when the geneticist told us we were going to have a son, and that he would also have Zellweger syndrome,” Nancy said. “He asked if we wanted to schedule a time to come in and talk about continuing the pregnancy.”
He wasn’t the last person to ask. Their situation was so horrific that when David and Nancy told their church family, there was an audible gasp of surprise and pain. Newspapers wrote stories. Time magazine ran a feature comparing the Guthries to Job. Even some Christian friends said they wouldn’t blame Nancy for choosing to abort.
Gabe’s story in Time magazine came out the day he was born / Courtesy of Nancy Guthrie
David and Nancy didn’t even consider it, in large part because, by now, their theology of God’s sovereignty was solid.
“I was thinking about Joseph in Genesis 45,” Nancy said. “I remember looking at David and saying the words Joseph said to his brothers, ‘It was not you that sent me here. It was God.’ That shaped everything.”
Nancy kept working out her thoughts in what would become her first book.
Holding On to Hope is an in-between book. It sits between the two major parts of Nancy’s life, the death of her children drawing a clear before-and-after line. It also straddles the fault line of her changing theology—there’s a Reformed emphasis on God’s sovereignty but also a general evangelical affirmation of human decisions and a tendency to look at Job as an example, rather than for what he reveals about Christ.
She wasn’t the only one refining her view of God. A current of theology in the evangelical river was beginning to gather and find momentum.
Reformation
Immediately after Holding On to Hope came out, Nancy was asked to write a follow-up year of devotionals. She wrote in the style of the day—a verse at the top of the page, an interesting short story, and a question or two at the end. If you wanted, there was an optional passage to read in your Bible.
The book isn’t distinctly Reformed. But to make sense of her own grief, Nancy kept drifting in that direction.
“The Reformed writers, preachers, and teachers were the ones with scriptural answers to suffering,” she said. “And with the doctrine of the sovereignty of God.”
Somebody gave her a cassette tape of a John Piper sermon—“To Be a Mother Is a Call to Suffer.” From there, she began reading the Desiring God website.
Nancy Guthrie teaching Hebrews at her church in 2005 / Courtesy of Nancy Guthrie
“Then I bought an iPod so I could listen to the White Horse Inn,” she said. “And they’d be talking about what people believed about something. And I’d be like, ‘That’s what I’ve thought! What’s the problem with that?’”
She’d rewind and listen again, trying to understand the distinctions and to refine her understanding. She also listened to the new pastor at her church, who was preaching through the Bible with an emphasis on redemptive history.
At the same time, she was afraid of becoming the woman on the evangelical speaker’s circuit who told the story of her loss over and over again.
“Probably from my BSF influence, I knew it was the Scriptures I wanted to be presenting—not just my personal story,” she said.
She tried to combine them, using her own story to teach the book of Job. Sometimes she got pushback—“the assumption was that women would be more interested in the story than something from the Scriptures,” she said.
Nancy kept speaking, writing, and learning. She listened to recordings of Tim Keller talking about the “true and better Abel” and Bryan Chapell explaining how you could see Christ not just in Old Testament prophecies but in patterns, events, symbols, and people.
“My mind was exploding,” she said. “I felt like I needed to go back to kindergarten to even understand the Bible.” She started reading Ed Clowney, Sinclair Ferguson, and Geerhardus Vos.
In 2007, she published Hoping for Something Better: Refusing to Settle for Life as Usual. It was a study of Hebrews, but “when I started writing, I did not know what biblical types were,” Nancy said. And she still had “deeply ingrained instincts on how to understand the Bible and communicate it, shaped by all the previous materials I’d worked on and who I’d been listening to.”
She got some pushback from Reformed reviewers.
“This was really the tipping point for me coming into not just understanding but communicating the Bible with sound Reformed theology,” she said. “I was on a steep learning curve.”
To keep teaching herself, she began editing compilations of Reformed writers—John Piper and Tim Keller and Don Carson, Calvin and Luther and Edwards, John Owen and J. I. Packer. In 2009, she began taking seminary classes and graduated with a master of arts in theological studies from Reformed Theological Seminary in 2024.
And since she was in the women’s ministry world, she also began looking around online at what women’s Bible studies were doing.
Reformation for Women
“Women’s Bible study tended to be dominated by reading the text and then immediately trying to figure out how that applies to you,” she said. But Nancy was reading and listening to a different kind of teaching.
“I remember reading in Luke 24 that on the road to Emmaus, ‘beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself,’” she said. “If the whole of the Old Testament is most profoundly about Christ, I wanted to understand it that way, and I wanted to help other women understand it that way.”
Nancy with her five-volume set on seeing Christ in the Old Testament / Courtesy of Crossway
Nancy took a run at it, writing a five-book series on finding Jesus in the Old Testament.
The format is completely different from her earlier work—Bible study rather than devotional. Readers are expected to open the Scripture, answer questions, and engage with other believers. The proportion of words spent on personal story versus Bible teaching is flipped. And though it’s written at a lay level, deeper theological truth runs through the whole thing.
From the first time Nancy led this study in her own church, she began to hear from women.
“This dear, godly, older woman—she knew her Bible and she’d been in the Scriptures her whole life—comes in,” Nancy said. “She asked me, tearfully, ‘How come I’ve never seen these things before?’”
Another woman asked if Nancy was coming up with a new and different way to read Scripture.
“No,” Nancy told her. “I’m actually bringing us back to the way the Bible was read before modern, pragmatic, lay-led Christian education in the church.”
Over the next five years, as Nancy released four more studies, she heard some version of those responses over and over.
Where Are the Women?
In the beginning, the leaders of the Young, Restless, Reformed movement were largely—in fact, almost entirely—male. Perhaps partly because of the emphasis on complementarianism, it was the men at the initial high-profile conferences (e.g., Together for the Gospel), writing blogs (e.g., Justin Taylor or Tim Challies), and leading (e.g., Mark Dever or Tim Keller).
But the women weren’t far behind.
In 2012, TGC held its first women’s conference in Orlando, Florida. More than 3,500 women came to hear speakers such as Paige Benton Brown, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, and Kathleen Nielson exposit Scripture on the character of God.
“Very few, if any, women’s conferences would have consistently been saying, ‘Let’s open up God’s Word together in these plenary sessions, and the speakers are going to be working through a text doing biblical exposition,’” said Nancy, who led a breakout. “It just was not in the landscape of many women’s events. That was huge.”
Nancy speaking at TGC’s first women’s conference in 2012 / Courtesy of The Gospel Coalition
One of the attendees was Jen Wilkin.
“There was no way I was missing this,” she blogged afterward. She remembered crying just seeing the conference advertised:
Do you know why I cried at my computer last summer? I cried because I want to end the crisis of biblical illiteracy in the church. I cried because I am determined to rescue a generation of young women from a faith grounded only in the shifting sands of emotionalism. I cried out of sheer relief that I wasn’t alone in my hope that things can change.
For too long women of belief have been the willing recipients of gender-specific teaching that patronizes their intellect and panders to their emotions. For too long churches have neglected to raise the bar, settling for a ministry model that is content to connect women in relationships without challenging them to deeper understanding of the Word. For forty-eight hours this weekend I got to hear influential voices raise a cry for a different standard. For forty-eight hours I got to entertain the very real possibility that the tide could turn.
Over the last 20 years, Jen and Nancy have both watched—and been instrumental in—a turning of the tide. In 2016, Nancy kicked off a 140-episode podcast for TGC called Help Me Teach the Bible, where she spoke with theologians all over the world about teaching all 66 books of the Bible. She kept writing books—on prayer, on Revelation, and on themes in Scripture. She began offering Biblical Theology Workshops for Women and speaking internationally, teaching women in dozens of countries from Italy to Brazil to the United Arab Emirates.
The fruit has been immense. Next week, more than 8,500 women will attend the TGC conference in Indianapolis, where Nancy, Jen, and others will teach expositionally from the Psalms. These days, instead of scrounging around to find gospel-centered and biblically literate female Bible teachers, conference organizers have to narrow the names down to around 50 to lead workshops and breakouts.
That’s because the number of women able to present Christ-centered expositional messages—from Nancy to Courtney Doctor to Ruth Chou Simons—has expanded significantly. And every time they post a podcast, write a Bible study, or talk through how the gospel affects all of life, they’re expanding the circle of women who better know and love the Lord.
“Nancy’s teaching has had such an incredible influence on how evangelical women understand and study Scripture,” said TGC vice president of discipleship programming Melissa Kruger. “She delights in the Word and invites others to do the same. Her life so beautifully reflects the truths she teaches.”
The Gospel Coalition