A few weeks ago I posted a short Substack note with a quote from one of my posts that traveled much farther than I expected it to.
The thought itself was fairly simple:
The response was huge, and told me something important—
Women are hungry for this.
Not hungry for another beautifully decorated fellowship hall or another afternoon where everyone listens to a speaker and then goes home to the same questions they had before they arrived.
Those things can certainly have value, and I have enjoyed plenty of them through the years, but there is a kind of discipleship that simply cannot happen from a platform.
It happens across a kitchen table.
It happens after a younger wife finally admits that she and her husband have been struggling and an older woman loves her enough to listen before she starts giving advice.
It happens when a young mother says, almost embarrassed, that she does not particularly enjoy motherhood right now, and the woman sitting across from her does not gasp or shame her because she remembers enough about raising children to know how exhausting certain seasons can be.
It happens when somebody farther down the road says, “I made that mistake too. Let me tell you what it cost me.”
That kind of wisdom has weight because it has been lived.
Titus 2 gives the church a pattern that is so simple we may have complicated ourselves right past it.
“The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things; That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.” Titus 2:3-5
Older women teaching younger women.
There is nothing particularly glamorous about the arrangement.
God did not require a conference, a degree, or that the older woman possessed a perfect history.
He required a godly woman who had lived long enough with Christ that she had something worth passing down.
I think we need to recover that.
There are younger women sitting in our churches right now who genuinely want help.
They love the Lord and want to build homes that honor Him, yet much of what they know about being a Christian wife, mother, homemaker, or woman has been gathered in fragments from books, podcasts, social media, and women their own age who are figuring out the same things at approximately the same time.
There is nothing wrong with learning alongside peers, but a twenty-five-year-old woman cannot give another twenty-five-year-old thirty years of perspective.
Some wisdom simply requires mileage.
There are things I understand about marriage now that I could not have understood when I was newly married because I had not lived enough marriage yet.
There are things motherhood taught me that no parenting book could have fully explained beforehand.
There are prayers I understand differently because I have waited years for answers.
There are biblical truths that settled into me only after life pressed hard enough that I had to discover whether I actually believed them.
That is part of the wealth older women possess.
And yet, strangely enough, many older women do not believe they have anything to offer.
I have heard women say some version of, “I wouldn’t know what to teach.”
Perhaps that is because we have allowed the word mentor to become far more intimidating than Titus ever made it.
A Titus 2 woman does not need to sit down and announce that she has become somebody’s spiritual authority.
She does not need twelve prepared lessons and a leather binder with tabs.
She needs an open Bible, a teachable spirit of her own, and enough honesty to tell a younger woman what the Lord has taught her.
Sometimes that includes what she learned by doing things well.
Sometimes the most valuable lesson comes from what she did badly.
I would much rather receive marriage counsel from a woman who can say, “I handled this terribly for several years, and the Lord had to deal with me,” than from a woman pretending she floated through forty years of marriage without ever speaking sharply, becoming resentful, or needing to apologize.
Failure, when it has been honestly repented of and learned from, can become useful wisdom in somebody else’s life.
That is one reason I dislike the polished version of biblical womanhood sometimes presented to younger women.
Real Christian women have had hard marriages.
They have lost their tempers with their children.
They have struggled with discontentment.
They have worried about money, compared themselves with other women, said things they regretted, wrestled with submission, carried bitterness longer than they should have, and discovered that sanctification takes considerably longer than they expected when they were twenty.
The older woman who has walked through those things with God possesses something a younger woman needs.
She can tell the truth without pretending the road is easy.
She can also testify that obedience is worth it.
Yet Titus 2 asks something of the older woman before she ever teaches anybody else.
Her own life must remain beneath the Word.
Age does not automatically produce wisdom, and years spent in church do not guarantee that our personal preferences have become biblical convictions.
That matters tremendously.
A younger woman does not need an older woman reproducing herself.
She needs someone pointing her toward Christ and Scripture.
There are things I did in our home that worked beautifully for our family and may be completely unnecessary in another woman’s home.
I have preferences, traditions, methods, and convictions formed through my own experience, and maturity requires enough humility to know which of those came directly from Scripture and which belong simply to the way we chose to live.
The older woman must know the difference.
Otherwise Titus 2 mentoring can quickly become, “Here is how I did it, therefore here is how a godly woman does it.”
That is dangerous.
The Bible needs to remain the authority sitting at the table.
And that thought is one of the reasons I began working on this study workbook.
I wanted to create something that serves the woman on both sides of Titus 2.
For the older woman, it is an opportunity to return to Scripture and brush up on the biblical foundations she is being asked to pass down.
Before pouring into somebody else, she can sit with the Word herself.
She can examine what she believes about marriage, womanhood, motherhood, the home, contentment, speech, service, prayer, submission, and spiritual growth, allowing Scripture to sharpen what years of life have taught her.
Perhaps it will remind her of things she once knew but has not thought about deeply in years.
Perhaps it will expose an area where preference has slowly become doctrine in her own mind.
Maybe it will give her language for truths she has lived for decades but never quite knew how to explain.
Then she can take that knowledge and use it.
Invite someone over.
Pour the coffee.
Open the Bible.
Begin.
But I have also thought a great deal about the younger woman who read that viral note and felt an ache because she wants a Titus 2 woman and does not have one.
What does she do?
Maybe her church does not currently have many older women.
Perhaps the women she knows are kind but nobody has ever taken the relationship deeper.
Maybe she moved recently, is newly saved, or has simply never experienced the kind of mentoring relationship Titus describes.
I do not want to tell that woman merely to wait.
This workbook is for her too.
A study cannot become the older woman Titus 2 describes.
Paper cannot sit across from you and recognize from your face that there is another layer to what you just said.
A workbook cannot watch your life long enough to notice patterns you cannot see yourself, and it cannot put an arm around you after telling you something difficult that you needed to hear.
Human relationship matters.
But while a woman waits and prays for that relationship, she does not have to remain spiritually hungry.
She has the Word of God.
And this study can help guide her through the very subjects she wishes an older woman would sit down and discuss with her.
Perhaps working through it will also help her recognize the woman she has been praying for.
Because I suspect some Titus 2 women are hiding in plain sight.
They may not have platforms.
They may never call themselves mentors.
One may simply be the older woman at church whose Bible is worn because she has actually been reading it for forty years.
Perhaps she has weathered a difficult marriage season without advertising it, raised children who are grown now, buried people she loved, survived years when money was thin, watched prayers be answered slowly, and learned that the Lord remains faithful through things younger women have not encountered yet.
There is treasure sitting in those pews.
Sometimes younger women need enough courage to ask for it.
“Would you have coffee with me?”
“How did you handle this when your children were little?”
“Would you pray with me about my marriage?”
“Can you tell me if I am seeing this situation clearly?”
Those invitations do not have to be complicated.
Neither does the older woman’s response.
“Yes.”
Then show up.
I think we have become so accustomed to institutionalizing everything that we forget how much of Christianity has always moved through ordinary relationships.
Paul told Timothy that the things he had learned were to be committed “to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.” 2 Timothy 2:2.
Truth moves forward because somebody receives it and then refuses to let it stop with them.
Psalm 145:4 says, “One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.”
One generation speaking to another.
There are women in our churches carrying decades of answered prayer, hard-earned wisdom, biblical conviction, mistakes redeemed by grace, and stories of God’s faithfulness that may disappear with them if nobody ever asks.
And there are younger women trying to learn womanhood from an algorithm.
That should bother us.
It certainly bothers me.
So perhaps the answer is less complicated than we have made it.
Older women, open your Bibles again and make certain what you are passing down deserves to be passed down.
Remember what God taught you.
Remain humble enough to keep learning.
Then look around.
There is probably a younger woman who needs some of what the Lord spent forty years teaching you.
Younger women, keep praying for that relationship, but do not wait passively for someone to formally announce herself as your mentor.
Look for faithfulness.
Look for fruit.
Find the woman whose life makes you want to follow Christ more closely and ask her a question.
Then ask another one.
That is the heart behind this workbook.
I want the older woman to be better equipped to fulfill Titus 2.
I want the younger woman who does not currently have a mentor to possess something solid and biblical to study while she waits.
And perhaps I want something else too.
I want this workbook to eventually become unnecessary between two women because it helped get them to the same table.
An older woman with years behind her.
A younger woman with years ahead.
Two open Bibles between them.
And somewhere in the middle, one generation finally passing to another the things that should never have stopped being passed down in the first place.
Biblical Womanhood
Want to go deeper?
One Generation to Another is a practical 10-session workbook created for both sides of the Titus 2 relationship.
Older women can use it to sharpen their own biblical understanding and prepare to faithfully teach the women coming behind them, while younger women who are still praying for a Titus 2 mentor can begin studying these truths for themselves.
With KJV Scripture, honest reflection questions, practical application, and conversation prompts, this study is meant to help us recover something the church desperately needs: one generation of faithful women intentionally passing biblical truth to the next.
*this digital PDF will be emailed out tomorrow afternoon (10/2/26), it will go to the email associated with your substack. If you don’t see it, check your spam folder!
