For most of her 53 years, starting in childhood playing basketball against boys, the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook has had the habit of defying barriers. It served her well starting college at age 16. It fortified her in becoming a television news producer as a young black woman. And it proved especially necessary when, in her mid-20s, she felt called to ministry.

Seeking ordination in the African-American church, Ms. Cook was prying open the gates of an institution heavily female in the pews but almost entirely male in the pulpit. The only congregation to take her as a pastor was a nearby moribund church in Manhattan’s Chinatown, not exactly a hotbed of black Baptists.

Yet after she built up her congregation there at the Mariners’ Temple, and founded subsequent churches in the Bronx, and along the way served as a domestic-policy fellow in the Clinton administration, she rose to the closest thing black Christianity has to a chief executive: president of the Hampton Ministers Conference, an umbrella group of 7,500 clergy members from the various African-American denominations.

Then, last month, the arc of Ms. Cook’s career drastically plunged. The woman who had thrived against basketball elbows, macho newsrooms and sexist churchmen ran into the strange ways of the United States Congress. Without public debate or a formal vote, her nomination to be the Obama administration’s special ambassador for international religious liberty quietly and cryptically died.