A shorthand phrase in Reformed and conservative evangelical circles for the older Christian woman described in Titus 2:3-5: "Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled." Paul to Titus: this is how the church trains the next generation of godly women.
The Titus 2 framework carries enormous weight. (1) Discipleship is mandated intergenerationally. Older women are not "retired from ministry"; they are the divinely-appointed trainers of younger women. Every older Christian woman has this charge. (2) The training is concrete and domestic. Paul does not list abstract virtues — he lists loving husbands, loving children, self-control, purity, working at home, kindness, submission to husbands. These are the ordinary faithfulnesses of Christian wifehood and motherhood. Young women need to see these modeled, not merely read about. (3) The goal is evangelistic. "That the word of God may not be reviled" (v. 5). The watching world judges the gospel by the lives of Christian families. When Christian wives and mothers live beautifully according to Scripture, unbelievers are drawn. When they do not, the gospel itself is mocked. (4) The modern church has largely abandoned Titus 2. The ministry infrastructure goes into women's retreats, book clubs, and para-church events that often do not train what Paul commands: the specific arts of being a wife, mother, home-maker, and godly woman across generations. The answer is not to cancel those events but to recenter them on Titus 2 content and, more importantly, to recover the old-fashioned relational mentoring Paul has in view. Every young wife should have access to two or three older women she can watch and question. Every older woman should be pouring her years of covenant experience into women coming behind her.