Looking for More in the Wrong Places: A Review of Ruth Haley Barton, Longing for More. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2007.

As a wife, mother, and teacher, Ruth Haley Barton understands the struggles many Christian women face through the different seasons of life, and it is her own experiences in her family and in ministry that seem to drive her passion to help women find their own "transformation" in Christ (i.e., Barton became dissatisfied with her role as "only" a wife [120] and also with a complementarian understanding of a woman's role in the church [64-65]). Barton is cofounder and president of The Transforming Center, a ministry devoted to "caring for the souls of pastors." She is also the author of several books including Sacred Rhythms, Invitation to Solitude and Silence, and Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership. Her present work, Longing for More, was previously published by Waterbrook as The Truths That Free Us.

Barton's book is divided into eleven chapters and is followed by two appendices, one on 1 Timothy 2 and one on adapting the book for a group study. The book is geared for a popular level audience. The first four chapters serve as background and exhortation to show women why they need transformation in Christ. Chapters five through ten look at six areas where women may need to experience transformation (overcoming materialism, in marriage, embracing biblical sexuality, embracing the transformations of motherhood, dealing with adversity, and relating to fellow Christian women). The final chapter serves as a conclusion to show what can happen if women are willing to experience transformation.

As one reads her work, a person may think it reminiscent of Betty Friedan's "problem without a name" in The Feminine Mystique in which women surveyed their lives and said that there had to be more to life than what they were experiencing. Barton echoes this sentiment. As a wife and mother, she began to feel that her identity had become too wrapped up in those labels. Unlike Friedan, though, Barton points readers to Christ to experience a fuller life.

One of the strengths of the work is Barton's transparency about her own struggles and hardships. Women reading the work will appreciate hearing her testimony and her references to biblical women who have experienced similar troubles. Unfortunately, Barton's solutions at points are based more on personal experiences and preferences than scriptural principles. It is dangerous because Barton refers to the "truth of her experiences" as warrant for positions she and other women take (88). A person's experience, though, is not truth like God's Word is truth. For example, Barton discusses a time in her life when she "needed to drop out of church for a while in order to let old wounds heal" (166). One wonders, however, how this pattern coheres with the biblical injunction that believers are not to give up assembling together (Heb 10:25). It is a slippery slope when one's own experience becomes the decisive factor in scriptural interpretation. Though Barton rightly criticizes feminists in several places throughout her book, she falls into the same trap they do by elevating experience as a source or norm by which truth can be learned and revealed.

Her opening chapter urges women to find their identities not in a man or a position, but in Christ alone. Her appeal is to married and single women alike that "none of us . . . can afford to invest our human relationships and endeavors with the meaning that only a relationship with God can provide" (24). This is true, but Barton's appeal to women to strengthen their "self-esteem" (29) is an appeal more to modern psychology than to Scripture. Certainly, women should find their identities and worth in Christ, but the Christian life is about putting others before ourselves; it is a life of denial-putting aside our own wants for the sake of the kingdom. This is the testimony of Christ (Matt 20:28, Luke 9:23). Self worth in Christ is a different concept than the world's idea of self-esteem.

Barton also denigrates the role of the homemaker suggesting that women may need more meaning in their life than "stereotypical women's work" (38). She states "women in our society have not always been encouraged to achieve outside the home or to be independent. This is another detriment to healthy self-esteem. . . . [S]he might miss out on the sense of self-worth that comes from developing her interests and gifts, and using them in the context of work that is meaningful and challenging" (39). Does that mean that a woman like Susanna Wesley who invested her life in her family and home probably suffered from low self-esteem or that her work in the home was not meaningful or challenging? Ironically, later in the book Barton recalls a time where both she and her husband were working outside of the home, so they paid their sixteen- year-old daughter to "cover the home front" two days a week (121). The activities her daughter took care of were "cooking, cleaning, shopping, driving and overseeing the activities of two younger sisters" (122). Interestingly, Barton notes that her daughter enjoyed these activities more than any of her summer jobs, and it "gave her valuable experience" and appealed to her "capacity for leadership and organization" (122). Why is it that when a teenager gets paid to do "women's work" it is valuable and appealing, but when a mother does the exact same things, it may hinder her self-esteem?

In chapters two and three and in the first appendix, Barton treats some of the gender passages in the Bible like Genesis 1-3, Gal 3:28, and 1 Timothy 2. The scope of her book does not allow for an in-depth treatment of these passages. She takes an egalitarian interpretation, and her footnotes reveal the great influence that the Kroegers' work on 1 Timothy 2 (I Suffer Not a Woman) had on her own understanding. Barton plays the Holy Spirit's gifting against scriptural instruction concerning headship in the home and in the church. She suggests that if the Holy Spirit gifts a woman for the pastorate then it cannot conflict with Scripture for her to serve in that capacity (76-77).

In the heart of Barton's book she examines six areas where women need to experience transformation—areas in which women may struggle to honor Christ. She argues that materialism causes women to seek contentment in the things of this world instead of in Christ. This is one of the strongest chapters in her work; she correctly diagnoses a problem that plagues American culture and Christianity.

As Barton moves to address the areas of marriage, sexuality, and motherhood, she relies more on the testimonies of women to support her arguments than scriptural principles. She suggests that stress caused by a woman submitting to her husband and "surrendering her personhood" is the culprit for dissatisfaction within marriage for women (114-16). However, the example she cites is of a woman whose husband did not exercise headship in a God-honoring way. She even links domestic abuse with headship and cites women who have been abused by husbands who were seen as pillars in the Christian community as warrant for why headship is a dangerous concept (188). However, it is the abuse of headship that is the problem in the examples she cites.

Two final observations regard the contradictions in Barton's work. She critiques the baby boomer's sense of entitlement (103) and people who strive for positions of prominence (219). She states, "With the baby-boomer generation came a propensity toward an attitude of entitlement that has influenced us all" (103). Yet, when she discusses women's service to the church, it is exactly the concept of entitlement that characterizes her attitude to women serving in positions of authority. Later in the book she says, "if we are at all honest, many of us would say that we too have wasted time and energy striving for positions of prominence at times when we could have been serving" (219). However, just a few pages later she questions, "Why should women be like Christ in humility and suffering yet unlike him in authority power and exaltation? The answer is: there is no reason at all" (221).

The title of Barton's book is Longing for More, and her claim is that "more" can only be found in Christ, yet she spends a good portion of her book arguing that a woman must be free to pursue her calling in any area of ministry and any place as long it is not just in the home. She argues that true fulfillment can never be found in a person or activity but then seems to suggest that women will never find true fulfillment if they are restricted from certain ministries. In a sense she argues for "Christ first" in some parts of the book and then "me first" at other points. Because of this mixed message, Longing for More is not the answer for women who are struggling in the six areas that Barton identifies. Her work is helpful in diagnosing many of the problems women struggle with, and that is helpful so far as it goes. But those who are looking for solutions to these problems will have to go elsewhere.