If We Have Male Elders Then Do We Really Need More Lady Bible Teachers?

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In the context of the church, the male elders would be a lot more of like the lecture type thing where they're teaching you the basics of theology, what's going on behind the scenes, but then older women coming along and teaching the younger women is a lot more like the lab where they're taking you by the hand and saying, all right, let's get really practical.

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What does this actually look like in your life? Tim, the question for today's episode is if we have male elders, do we really need more lady

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Bible teachers? Well, the short answer to this question is no, but then it's always surprising what people hear when you answer that question in that kind of way.

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So it may be helpful to try to clarify it a little bit. But when you look at the

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Bible, one of the things you realize is that God has gifted male elders to be the leaders of the church, and they're the ones who are to teach the

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Bible on a primary sense. And then what many people go to when they're trying to answer a question like this is they'll go to a passage,

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Titus 2, and Titus 2 essentially says that the older women are likewise to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine.

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They are to teach what is good and so train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self -controlled, pure workers at home, kind and submissive to their own husbands that the word of God may not be reviled.

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So you have a passage right there which is talking about the importance of older women teaching younger women certain things related to their domestic responsibilities and how to love a husband, how to love their children.

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But then the problem is that many people when they hear the way in which you phrase that question, the idea of a lady

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Bible teacher, the idea of a lady Bible teacher is a lot different than the idea of whatever

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Titus 2 is talking about here, if that makes sense. So you have two different ideas.

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So if I say something like, I don't think that the Bible teachers need for more lady

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Bible teachers, you can understand that in one sense, in the sense that I intend, which is to say that we don't need more

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Beth Moores out there, like a more doctrinally orthodox Beth Moore. Yeah, I was about to say, I don't think we need any

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Beth Moores out there. We don't need any, we have enough Beth Moores, right? But no,

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I mean, most people, what they think immediately when they think about a female Bible teacher is basically a

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Beth Moore type. So like a lady who is going to be doing book studies of the Bible that are packaged to women from a woman's perspective.

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And a lot of this comes from a standpoint of epistemology, essentially, which is the idea that you need a woman to teach the

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Bible from a woman's perspective in order for women to be able to hear the Bible, to put it crassly, in their heart language or something like that.

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In their heart language, yeah. That's beautiful. That is, yeah. And so many people, what they're looking for, like when they're looking for a lady, like if you have a woman who's looking for a lady

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Bible teacher, they're looking for, you know, they obviously gravitate towards women like Beth Moore and all you're going to get there is just an emotional dumpster fire of nonsense, charismatic nonsense.

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But, you know, putting that aside for a second, let's say that you had like a female version of John MacArthur or something who is doing a

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Bible study. The point, though, is just to ask the question. Jane MacArthur. Jane MacArthur, yeah. I'm not actually sure what his wife's name is, but suppose that she was really solid or whatever.

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The question you're asking is, is that really what the Bible envisions? So what's the point of male elders?

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Why did God appoint male Bible teaching elders who are supposed to guard the sound doctrine and all that in the church if ladies really need to have their own like personal female

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Bible studies, like official formal female Bible studies taught by women? And so, you know, a lot of this is related to just how you conceive of a church being run in general and the kind of things that you need.

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So there's a lot of ladies who technically think that, yeah, they're going to submit to their male pastor because the

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Bible says that pastors should be male. But for them, it's almost just this irrational concept that has no correlation to reality at all.

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Meaning, like, meaning it's just something that God arbitrary decided that a pastor was going to be a male.

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But then it seems to me what they're doing is they're undermining that with all of their female Bible studies, meaning like they really feel like in order to really grow, they need a lady to teach the same territory to them, you know, in small groups or on their own or wherever else.

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And so their go to moves are to go to ladies who are going to basically, you know, teach them systematic theology or teach them, do book studies with them and all that.

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But then it's none of that seems to be at all what Titus 2 is talking about. OK. OK. Why not?

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So the justification for this kind of thing is found in Titus 2, but the kind of things found in Titus 2 are not like it's not like a woman going through the

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Gospel of John from a lady's perspective kind of thing happening in Titus 2. What's happening in Titus 2 is you have older women.

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Titus 2, 3, I can read it again. It says, older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine there to teach what's good.

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So teaching. But here's where we're using teaching in a different way, OK? So you can teach the

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Bible in different ways. You can teach it from the standpoint of going verse by verse, exposition through a particular book.

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You can teach it that way. But then look at what the passage is saying. It's saying, so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self -controlled, pure working at home, kind, submissive to their own husbands, so that the word of God may not be reviled.

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So this is just practical, applying their domestic roles and the responsibilities it takes to love a husband and love their children in the context of life.

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And it seems that we really have a deficit of female Bible teachers out there who are doing

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Titus 2. You know, there's sloppy versions of, like, there's like the Beth Moore types.

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And then there's a lot of lady Bible teachers out there who are, you know, trying to be the more careful biblical

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Beth Moore type. But it doesn't seem to me that you have a lot of older women who are willing to come along and get in younger women's home and teach them how to meal plan, teach them about cleaning schedules, teach them about, you know, how to care for their children, teach them how to love their husbands and all the ways that the

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Bible tells them to love their husbands. It seems like we really need that kind of thing. But then that kind of thing seems like unspiritual to the minds of many people.

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So it doesn't, like, it feels like, you know, if you're going to grow together, what do you do? You just get together and you have a

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Bible study together or something like that. And that's how you grow. But there's a very real need to apply what you're, not just to be like heroes of the world, but to be doers also.

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You have a very real need for older women to come along and teach younger women to do these, you know, domestic responsibilities.

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And it seems like we're at an all -time low as it relates to those kind of things right now. Like, we're at a point right now where that's what we really need.

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Like, what we really need is a bunch of older women to, you know, mentor women on these specific gender role kind of things.

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But then we're at a point in our society right now where we hate these gender roles in general. And then if we do recognize them at all, they're just things that kind of we give lip service to.

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We're not going to hold each other to very specifically. And then you have no shortage of, you know, women coming along, encouraging women to be basically lazy homemakers and everything else.

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And what you need is you need, like, you need older women to come along and help mentor them to do the kind of things

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Scott's called them to. Right. So basically what you're saying is we need fewer women who are, you know, teaching the

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Bible in, like, a formal sense, right? But then they are still teaching the

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Bible because, you know, ideally, and if they're really committing themselves to this passage, then they're saying, hey,

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I'm going to, as an older woman, you know, in my local church,

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I'm going to commit some of my time to teaching the younger women how to obey the

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Bible in a very practical way. And so you mentioned the things like, you know, a lot of like meal, you know, meal prepping, meal planning, taking care of your children, a lot of a lot of things that seem to relate to homemaking.

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Right. Yeah. I mean, it's a difference between, like, teaching, like, you know, a philosophy of blacksmithing or something like that and to, like, get a get you get a young guy in the forge with you and teach him how to how to move the metal.

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OK. Right. So, I mean, it's that it's the difference between two different types of learning. And so the only way the only category for learning that we typically have is that just sit down and listen to the person teach kind of learning.

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But then that isn't really what this is talking about at all. This is talking about getting in the forge. OK. I could use the male analogy in that way.

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It's like getting getting in the forge and showing you the basics of it. And that's the very thing that we need. And that's the very thing that no one really is doing.

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OK. Right. I'm not saying no one's doing, but few and far between. There are very few women out there who are devoting themselves to this like they should.

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And I mean, I can tell you there's so many young women out there saying, where are these women to teach us what to do?

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We don't know what to do. Now that turnaround is fair play. There's not a lot of young ladies who want it either. Yeah.

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Yeah. So it goes both ways. But then what you like, there's just different types of learning.

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And what you're not doing is you're not just having like a like the Bible doesn't envision you have like women need, you know, male elders and then they need like a female elder who is teaching and correct all the deficiencies of the male elder and his limited perspective and whatever else.

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Right. Right. It's not that it's like this is this is more like the blacksmith analogy. Now, I mean, now, does that mean that like ladies like a bunch of single ladies can't get together and do a

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Bible study together? No, they can. Like what else are you going to do with your time? Right. Right. Yeah. So that's not we're talking about.

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But what we're talking about is the church doesn't need more formal ministries that are devoted to having like, you know, basically replacement female pastors for women like you can get together and study

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Bible study. But if you're going to do that, why would you need a lady Bible study? Sure. You're going to do.

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Why not just get a John MacArthur Bible study and do it together if you want to. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me a lot of like, you know, when

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I was in college, I had to take a lot of science courses. And one of the you know, the way that most of them worked is you would have like a you would have like an hour to an hour and a half of lecture time.

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And then you would have on a lot of times a different day, you would have a lab time.

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Right. And so the lecture time is where you're learning the the con you're learning the concepts, you know, they're teaching you a lot of like what's going on behind the scenes.

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But then the lab is where you get really practical with it all. And you're doing a lot of the things that you've been reading about.

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And it sort of makes it all real for you and helps you understand in that way. And so so when

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I hear what you're saying, I'm reminded a lot of that. So in the in the context of the church, the male elders would be a lot more of like the lecture type thing where they're teaching you the basics of of theology, what's going on behind the scenes.

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But then women coming older women coming along and teaching the younger women is a lot more like the lab where they're taking you by the hand and saying, all right, let's get really practical.

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What does this actually look like in your life? Let's deal with the issues that are specific to your context.