Older women, teach the younger

Older women are to teach what is good, and so train the young women. Paul does not suggest it. He commands it. Every congregation must have women in a teaching office so that the younger women have a woman to learn from.

Titus 2:3–5 names a teaching office. Older women in every congregation are kalodidaskalous — "teachers of what is good," a compound word that exists in extant Greek literature only here, invented to name the role. They are commissioned as trainers of the younger women, the way older men are commissioned as trainers of the younger men a few verses earlier. Whatever the content they teach (the list includes love of family, self-control, household competence, and submission to one's own husband — contested in content), the structural instruction is unambiguous: women must hold a formal teaching position in the church. A congregation without women teaching women is out of compliance with Titus 2.