I TIMOTHY 3:1-2

Q: Paul lists one of the elder roles as 'teaching.' Therefore doesn't it follow that only males can teach in the church while females can teach one another and children?

I would have to disagree with your conclusion on several grounds:

1. The various lists in the NT of the gifts of the Spirit include teaching, and there is no restriction in these passages as to whom the Spirit is going to give these gifts. One passage of interest is I Corinthians 14:26: “When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation.” To deny a woman who obviously is gifted in this way runs the risk of offending the Holy Spirit.

2. As far as I can see, it is not exactly clear that Paul states that the elders are necessarily all to be teachers. I Timothy 5:17 mentions “ruling” the church as their main duty and singles out for special honor those elders who do happen to preach and teach, which implies that not all elders did this. I Timothy 3:1-7 doesn't mention teaching as a duty of the elders, only caring for and managing the church. Titus 1:5-9 states that elders must be able to preach and refute the arguments of unbelievers. Since preaching and teaching are distinguished from one another elsewhere in the NT, neither of the two duties in Titus indicates a teaching ministry within the church.

3. Even if one can make the case that one of the roles for an elder is teaching, that does not in the least eliminate other people from also serving in that role. To use that reasoning would be the same as saying that only elders in the church are to be “hospitable, a lover of goodness, prudent, etc.” just because Titus 1:8 gives those as characteristics of an elder. Deacons, for example, have much the same list of qualifications.

4. Regarding your last conclusion, Titus 2:3-5 is the only place I know where a positive teaching role in the church might be mentioned. It is usually the passage used to justify women teaching children in junior church or Sunday school, and perhaps leading a woman's seminar on occasion. Actually, there is absolutely no justification for these practices if one wishes to be strictly literal in interpreting the Bible. I think that these exceptions have been made in the modern church because few men are interested in such teaching ministries, not because the NT necessarily allowed it.

This passage only alludes to older women, probably widows. None of these women is given permission to teach children, other than their own, and certainly not in a church setting.

Their “teaching” of the younger women, according to evangelical commentaries I have read on this passage, consists of “encouraging,” “teaching by example,” “by their lives and behavior, not formally accredited teachers of the younger women,” “not public teaching, but ministry in the home,” “teaching them about their duties,” “modeling or mentoring in areas ranging from domestic responsibilities to personal godliness,” and “teaching younger women and children in their own household only.” Thus, even women teaching children in junior church or leading a woman's seminar sponsored by the church fall outside the strict scriptural mandate. That is especially true if the teacher is not an “older woman.”

In conclusion, many conservative churches are quite inconsistent in applying the NT to actual practice, accommodating to the current situation where it pleases them but hanging on to literal teachings in other cases to demonstrate their supposedly high view of scripture. Two examples of conservative Christian organizations trying to find scriptural permission for women to teach are both derived from the story of Priscilla and Aquila “explaining” (not teaching) things to Apollos. When I was attending one church, our Sunday school class was told by the elders that we could on occasion have one of our women teach a class as long as she was under the headship of her husband and that he had reviewed what she was going to say ahead of time. The other example is the fact that conservative seminaries sometimes have women professors on their faculty but limit their teaching activities to “non-doctrinal” areas like computer programming, archeology or church history, etc. The idea seems to be that they are merely following the pattern of Priscilla in explaining factual matters only.

Concerning the actual definition of “teaching” in the Pastoral Epistles, the Greek word (didasko) has a variety of meanings in the NT depending on the actual context. Here are some comments from the Dictionary of New Testament Theology, vol. 3, regarding the meaning of the word in other passages:

“What is taught may be knowledge, opinions or facts...The aim of all teaching is to communicate knowledge and skill with a view to developing the pupil's abilities, but not to force his will in a particular direction...what is taught is sound doctrine passed down from others...to teach in the sense of handing down a fixed body of doctrine which must be mastered and then preserved intact...men holding this office had the task of explaining the Christian faith to others and of providing a Christian exposition of the OT...in the Pastorals it is usually prefaced by 'sound,' meaning a fixed orthodoxy which the churches have received and which it is their duty to preserve against heresy.”