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Now, let's get into the Titus 2 woman.
I recently came across an instagram post about the Titus 2 woman, and while I agreed with everything the post said—pointing out that we want to return to traditional living, but we would rather learn from our peers on a fancy social media platform than from the older woman in the pew behind us—the comment section left me a bit disconcerted.
Most of the girls commenting on the post (ironically on a post from one of their peers on a fancy social media platform) expressed frustration because the older women in their church weren’t godly women, had no interest in sharing their wisdom, or simply wanted to tell them everything they were doing wrong. I don’t usually get involved in these online discussions, but I was moved to pipe in.
We often place the Titus 2 woman up on a pedestal as this overly spiritual woman with a halo and the patience of a saint. But when we read the passage, we find real women living real lives raising real children, snotty noses and all.
When Titus was left in Crete to help these churches establish leaders, the churches were in their infancy. These Cretans had become believers and were coming out of a very corrupt culture. When Paul gave Titus the guidelines for the Titus 2 woman, there were no Titus 2 women yet. There were no women who had grown up in the church, had raised their kids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, or had loved their husbands the way the Bible commands us to do it.
In fact, read Titus 2:3-5 with the opposite of what Paul suggests in mind. The women were irreverent in behavior, slanderers, slaves to wine (drunks). They couldn’t teach what they didn’t know, so they were not training the young women to love their husbands and children. In fact, they were probably modeling a disdain for their husbands and children (sounds a bit like our culture). They were not self-controlled, pure, working at home (so their focus was not their families). They were unkind. They were not submitting to their own husbands (which makes you wonder to whom they were submitting).
Granted, we don’t know that all of the women were like this or had every single one of these traits, but Paul was teaching them something new. The Cretans had a terrible reputation for immorality and violence. The Titus 2 woman did no exist in the churches in Crete. Titus was there to help start that ministry, and it would be a while before it would look the way the passage says.
So in the mean time, the older women and the younger women just did life together, working together to create a godly environment. While there may have been times of dedicated Bible study, which would have been studying the Old Testament, it probably looked more like sharing what they were learning as they simply did life in community under the authority of their new church with the help of the Holy Spirit.
And that is my encouragement to you. The Titus 2 woman wasn’t a formal mentoring program. It was simply spending time together, doing life together, and, along the way, learning together.
We want to show up to a mentoring session with our notebooks and pens ready to make a checklist we can work through, but mentoring looks more like simply cooking together or cleaning together or serving together, and along the way someone drops a nugget of wisdom she didn’t even realize she dropped.
It is about investing time, energy, and thought in one another. It is being vulnerable with one another. It is learning and growing with one another.
If there aren’t any Titus 2 women around you, then you be that woman. Seek out other women (don’t worry about them being older or younger than you) and build relationships. Then seek to always point each other to Christ.
