Kay

Mark,
I see that Cheryl has thoroughly addressed your reponse to my question #123. I’ll just reiterate a couple of things.

You said #103, “I disagree. Verse 3-16 have nothing to do with women leaders in the church. Paul is clearly instructing Timothy about widows.I fail to see where the ‘requirements and characteristics’ are for the women leaders. Please point these out! Verses 17-21 are about accusations against elders, not summary statements about the leaders. I cannot see where your line of reasoning nor your interpretation of the passage is coming from. Don’t push for a passage about leaders that is clearly not there.”

– regarding this I’ll again quote MacArthur:
*This was not a list of those widows eligible for specially recognized church support (all widows in the church who had no other means of support were; v. 3), but rather those eligible for specially recognized church ministry (cf. Titus 2:3–5). the wife of one man. Lit. “one-man woman” (cf. 3:2,12). –The MacArthur Study Bible*

With regard to this I wrote:
In Titus 2:3 Paul instructs Titus, the pastor of Crete: “Likewise, tell the older women to be reverent in behavior, not to be slanderers or slaves to drink; they are to teach what is good.” The Greek word used for these older women is ‘presbutidas’.
These elders are instructed “to teach what is good.”Teach is from ‘didaskolos’ which is the word Paul uses to describe teaching the Gospel…there is no reason to believe that the younger women are the only ones in Titus congregation they taught.

You said: “Important to always keep in close mind is context. Does the passage here address both male and female or just male. Although Paul does use ‘ei tis’ the qualifiers ‘husband of one wife’, ‘managing his family’ (related to Eph 5 as the head) aswell as the correlating passage in Titus 1 show us that Paul is addressing males. I have heard others attempt an argument that legally only men could have multiple partners, but this line of argument is very weak. There is nothing in the passage to think that this is why Paul makes the statement- it is assumption based not on the context of the passage.”

– Now, as you can see from Cheryl’s comments, there can be more than one reason Paul would make stipulations like: “husband of one wife” or “the wife of one man”. (Lit. “one-man woman” (cf. 3:2,12)

These instances are very much like the one you and I agreed on regarding Phoebe. The possibility/probability of female “widow” elders cannot be ruled out. In fact, as you see there is a lot of evidence for it.