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Beth Moore Photo Credit: Baptist Press

Beth Moore is petite, but her body language is larger than life. She paces the stage dramatically, gesturing wildly with her hands and arms. Her attractive eyes bulge with intensity as she speaks. Her voice, with its mild Texas accent, rises and falls like a dazzling violin solo. Moore's charisma is contagious. Give her five minutes and she can have an arena full of women bursting at the seams with laughter and feeling like they've known the spirited Bible teacher for their entire life.

Her secret? This wife and mother of two grown daughters knows how to relate to today's overextended Christian women because she's been there.

"We all know who this one is," she once told members of her Bible study class at First Baptist Church of Houston, Texas, as she held up a Superwoman costume. "This is the woman who is busy, busy, busy. She is happiest not only controlling her life, but also the lives of those around her. This is the woman with the bumper sticker that says, 'God could not be everywhere, so he created me.'"

The audience of 2,000 roared in approval of Moore's bull's-eye observation of the life that many women lead. But once Moore had the women's attention, her tone became more serious and reflective. Moore had a message from God that she needed to deliver. While the topics of her Bible-study classes or weekend conferences may vary, a few key principles are always present.

"She uses the phrase, 'The ground is level at the foot of the cross,'" says Libby Holder, a Florida woman who has attended two of Moore's weekend conferences. "Beth teaches us that it doesn't matter where you come from, because we all come to Christ the same way. I came away with the idea that God just takes ordinary people and uses them in extraordinary ways."

That last statement is actually an accurate description of Moore's own rise to the rank of one of America's top Bible teachers. It also explains how a stay-at-home mom with no formal theological training became a Bible teacher whose study materials have surpassed Henry Blackaby's wildly popular Experiencing God series in sales.

Experiencing God sold more than 2 million copies. It is estimated that Moore's seven Bible-study workbooks have sold more than 4 million copies since the first one, A Woman's Heart: God's Dwelling Place, was published in 1995. And that's a conservative estimate. Some industry sources put Moore's sales more in the 7-million range.

Not bad for someone who doesn't promise a bunch of spiritual quick fixes. Moore sells the Bible, plain and simple. Her frank yet engaging style of communication, however, has affected women —and men—across the country to their innermost core.

"We had her at our church several years ago," says Holder, 60, a member of the large First Baptist Church of Orlando. "I sat there with my mouth hanging open. It took me two weeks to process everything."

That's because Moore, who is 45, doesn't hold back when it comes to sharing what God has taught her. "She just has to teach it," says Carolyn O'Neal, director of women's ministries at Moore's home congregation of First Baptist-Houston, and a longtime friend of Moore's. "She says it's just got to come out."

What comes out is Moore's passion that other women get to know Jesus in an intimate way. "You know that she knows her [heavenly] Father and that it's not fake," Holder adds. "She shares some of her hurts and some of the things she's been through and how God still chose to use her. There's such freedom at her conferences. She says that God has a plan and purpose for each one of us, and that no matter who we are or where we have been, God wants us to live in total freedom."

Moore's conferences begin on a Friday evening and conclude on Saturday. Her girl-next-door persona (friends say she can down a bowl of chili cheese dip and chips in no time flat) draws as many as 10,000 women to the weekend venues. What keeps them coming back, though, is Moore's compelling message that abundant life awaits those who will hungrily devour Scripture.

At the start of a typical conference, Moore can be found on her knees in front of the women who have come to hear her speak. After opening with prayer, Moore always appeals to women to devote their everyday affairs to God and kneel before the Scriptures. Her mission is to promote biblical literacy. Her approach is clearly working.

"People are wanting to know that the Word of God is not just a book of doctrinal dos and don'ts—that it's a book of relationship," Moore says. "I think people struggle to believe in the absolute unfailing love of God; to know the romance of Christ. To let him get much further than skin deep."

Moore says her mission is to show Christians that the Bible "still speaks, still transforms, that it has the power to change lives."

"I am one of those lives," she says.

Humble beginnings
Moore's growing collection of Bible-study materials, including To Live Is Christ and Breaking Free, are used in churches around the world. Her study on the life of David, called A Heart Like His, is in its 16th printing. She's by far the biggest selling author of LifeWay, the church resources arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Her new Bible study Beloved Disciple, which focuses on the Gospel of John, hit shelves in December. LifeWay ordered 285,000 copies for the first printing, the largest order ever made for Moore's materials.

LifeWay officials are trying to be more prepared this time, says Dale McCleskey, Moore's editor, because so many pre-orders were made when Moore's last study, Jesus, the One and Only, came out two years ago that the company ran out of copies before materials were even released to bookstores.

As a speaker, Moore is also in high demand, with engagements that now extend around the globe. This past summer, she traveled to South Africa for a week to speak to a group of Southern Baptist women missionaries.

"It's amazing to think about it all at times," Moore says, with genuine wonder and humility.

Years ago, the work she did at her local church began on a much smaller scale. Friends now say that it was Moore's faithfulness in the small things that laid the foundation for the huge ministry she heads today.

In the early 1980s, while she was still trying to discern how God wanted to use her in full-time ministry, Moore helped take care of kids at her church during the week so that other moms could take a midday break. She led an aerobics class that often ended with a short devotion. She invited groups of women into her home for Bible study and led a monthly prayer breakfast.

These activities don't sound nearly as exciting as the life Moore leads today—dashing around the U. S. and across the world as one of the most respected and sought-after Bible teachers.

But in Moore's eyes, every step she has taken along the way since committing her life to vocational ministry at age 18 has been a step of service to God. And that might just be the key to her success.

"All I knew was to just walk through the door, whatever it was," Moore says. "Even when I was a young married and I taught Mother's Day Out, if someone had said, 'I thought you surrendered to ministry,' I would have said, 'This is ministry.' I knew whatever it was, I was to do it for the glory of God. And that was my calling."

Her calling eventually took on a larger dimension, as Moore stayed involved at First Baptist Church of Houston, a huge Southern Baptist congregation she joined in the early 1980s, and the place she now teaches a coed Sunday-school class of 600 members and leads a Tuesday-night Bible study that draws more than 3,000 women.

It was volunteering to teach Sunday school more than a decade ago at First Baptist that helped Moore realize she didn't know Scripture the way she desired. To strengthen her knowledge of the Bible, she enrolled in a doctrine class at church that she secretly feared would be boring. But as she watched the teacher lovingly pore over Scripture, Moore realized something was missing in her life.

"I began to pray two things," she remembers. "I prayed to love God more than I love any other thing in all of life. And then I prayed to love his Word. And all I can tell you is when I began to pray that, he started to do it."

After committing her life to ministry while working at a Baptist girls' camp, Moore initially thought she should pack up and head to the mission field overseas. But with the help of a few close friends who became her mentors, she realized her calling was to disciple Christians through teaching the Bible.

Moore's deep yearning to know Scripture led her to write a number of studies based on the lives of biblical figures like David, Paul, and even Jesus. Perhaps her most popular study, called Breaking Free, drew from Moore's personal experiences to show believers how they can be released from the trappings of sin or pain and experience joy and freedom in Christ.

Expanding her reach
By the mid-'90s Moore's weekly Bible class had grown from 200 to 2,000 women, and she had become a sought-after speaker throughout churches in South Texas. That's when LifeWay approached her about publishing her Bible studies. Books, many of them based on these studies, followed, and soon an evangelical superstar was born.

Moore went on to assemble a worship band and took her passion for discipling women on the road, holding weekend conferences from coast to coast. She founded Living Proof Ministries (supported by her book royalties) as a base for her national speaking ministry.

Some say the in-depth approach that Moore has taken toward Bible study sets her apart among nationally known teachers. Indeed, flipping through Moore's books, such as her two most recent bestsellers Jesus the One and Only and When Godly People Do Ungodly Things (both from Broadman & Holman), one can quickly see that Moore is not interested in superficial Bible lessons; she wants to take her audiences deeper.

"She calls women to do things that some of them think they can't do—study God's Word," says Norma Hedin, an associate professor of Christian education at Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. "She doesn't talk down to women. She just says, 'You need to get into the Bible. Here's how.'"

Hedin herself has worked through several of Moore's studies in small-group settings. She recently took part in Moore's ten-week online study, Believing God. Moore taught the study live from Houston on Tuesday nights to more than 3,000 women. Video recordings of the lessons were placed on the Internet, along with other materials. According to First Baptist's O'Neal, more than 20,000 women registered for the study, which concluded in November.

Printing out the materials from the Internet, Hedin worked through the online study with her sister, who lives in Tennessee. For Hedin and many other women, the balance that Moore strikes between scholarly knowledge and application for everyday living is just right.

"The ideas are deep but practical," Hedin says. "She communicates that the intent of the gospel is that you live it out day by day."

John Bisagno, the former pastor of First Baptist Houston, mentored Moore, He agrees that Moore's balanced approach has made her a stellar teacher.

"She's had private Greek lessons," Bisagno says of Moore's devotion to biblical scholarship. "But Beth's secret is not that. It's in her commitment to the Word and applying it. She just sparkles. Beth's got the whole package."

Bisagno gave Moore opportunities to grow as a teacher by allowing her to speak regularly during the church's Sunday-evening services. Bisagno, who retired three years ago after pastoring in Houston for 30 years, says he can remember Moore frequently coming to him with questions about Scripture. "She would always come to me and ask if this or that was right," he recalls.

Moore wanted to make sure she knew her stuff, and Bisagno played a big role in her development. Their relationship stands out as unique in a denomination where leaders assert that women should not be pastors or hold prominent positions of leadership over men in a church.

Bisagno, however, said Moore never went against Southern Baptist beliefs. "Beth would be strong to tell you that she doesn't think a woman should be a preacher," he says.

Moore admits she steers clear of denominational issues. "My thing is discipleship," she says. "That's what I love and feel most called to. My part is very undenominational. I'm not really into the [Southern Baptist] political scene."

Overcoming a painful past
While Bisagno and others respect Moore as a prominent spiritual leader, her rise to celebrity status hasn't made life perfect for Moore. Along the way, she's faced deep pain.

Abused by someone outside of her immediate family as a child, Moore's scars ran deep and followed her into adulthood. In the preface to her Breaking Free workbook, she shares how she felt so violated and ashamed that she didn't even want to wear white on her wedding day. "I did not feel pure," she writes. "[There were] scars from being a childhood victim of someone else's problem."

It's a feeling that unfortunately many women can relate to, Moore says. But that doesn't mean she's felt compelled to share all the details of the horrible ordeal.

"I never share the details of my childhood victimization for two reasons," Moore says in Breaking Free. "First, I want the Healer glorified, not the hurt; and second, a greater number of people can relate to more general terms.

"I believe ultimately Satan is the chief abuser," she continues. "Satan accused me every day of my life from that time on until I said 'Enough!' and agreed to let God bring healing and forgiveness."

This wasn't the last time she would turn to God for healing. Later in life, after the birth of her two daughters, Moore and her husband, Keith, adopted a 4-year-old boy who was the son of a close family member. For seven years, Moore raised Michael like he was her own.

Then one day the birth mother decided she wanted her son back. The anguish that this caused Moore and her family, as she recounts in her 2000 autobiographical book, Feathers from My Nest, once again left Moore crying out to God.

"From the very first stages of our 'adoption' dialogue until now—a season spanning over a dozen years—I have encountered complexities of circumstances and emotions like nothing I've ever known," Moore writes in Feathers. "God never promised us answers in this lifetime, but he did indeed promise treasures to the seekers (Isaiah 45: 3)."

Moore's willingness to talk about this and other personal trials—like when she lost her mother to cancer or watched her daughter struggle through an eating disorder—has helped many women face similar challenges.

"She's very real and open with her own struggles," Hedin says. "She doesn't set herself up as a woman who knows it all. She's had some tough things happen in her life. She doesn't go into detail, but she lays them out and says, 'I've been there.'"

The fact that other women are being set free from sin and bondage by studying Moore's materials is proof that God is alive and at work in Moore's life, said First Baptist of Orlando's Holder.

Holder has completed every one of Moore's studies and has taught Breaking Free five times to groups of women ranging from age 20 to 80 at her church.

"Breaking Free has had the most impact as far as seeing change in the women," Holder says. "It's about untying the chords of the yokes that hold us."

Holder has also taught some of Moore's studies along with her husband to a coed group of men and women church members. She says more men are starting to tune in to Moore's teachings.

"She keeps reminding us that God's love endures forever," Holder adds. "God's got his hand on that woman. His love flows through her words."

A Christian Reader original article. Corrie Cutrer is a journalist living in the Chicago area. Additional reporting by Mark Galli, managing editor of Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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