Titus 2:3-5 in a College Context — Part 1
I’ve been thinking today about Titus 2:3-5: “Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored” (NAS).
I ordered a book last month called Becoming a Titus 2 Woman by Martha Peace. It turned out to be a great book, but it is focused almost exclusively on older married women teaching and discipling younger married woman. Which I guess makes sense since that is the context of the verse. I found a lot in it that I can learn from as a younger wife and mom, and it gave me a lot of good ideas for the future when God may give me some younger married women to disciple.
I had been hoping, however, to find advice applicable to my current situation of discipling single women, and helping them in turn be better disciplers of the younger women following them. I’m not sure a book has really been written on that. I don’t think there are even very many websites about it. Sure, there are plenty of resources about discipleship of college students or young adults in general, but what about the unique needs of women? A brief search for Titus 2 resources in the college context revealed mostly websites about things like why single women are disobeying Titus 2 by going to college because it isn’t preparing them to be a “worker at home.” Hardly useful.
(A brief aside: Whenever I read websites along those lines it makes me think that they must not care that there are so many unsaved women at those colleges that these Godly Christian young women could be reaching out to. Their advice is that single women should always remain home (and possibly not even work) until they are married. Again, hardly useful to those women that get saved in high school or college and don’t have Christian parents. Wow. Back to the topic at hand…)
In one sense the single women need to learn the same things the married women do, since the vast majority will be married at some point in their lives. Most single women I know love to think and dream about their future married life…it doesn’t seem like they need any more encouragement to do so. As I now look back on it, I didn’t really try at all to learn things about being a Godly wife when I was a college student or just past college. I did, however, pick up a lot of things I didn’t even realize I was learning just by being around older married women. I also had ample time to read, learn, listen to teachings, and ask questions about marriage after Tony and I started courting and I knew I was moving much closer to the marriage phase of my life.
So it seems like there is a lot of room in a college ministry (and post-college working singles ministry) for the principles of Titus 2 to be “translated” into an appropriate context for that stage of life. So what should the older women be teaching the younger women in that situation?
I have a few thoughts on that…but I think I will save them for the next post, since this one is getting plenty long. Meanwhile, if you have any thoughts, please share them!