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Podcast: Why the Church Needs Spiritual Mothers (Susan Hunt)

July 03, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Essential Role That Older Women Have in Your Church

In today’s episode, Susan Hunt reflects back on decades spent working to nurture the practice of Christian mentoring and shares her personal experience of mentoring others and being mentored herself.

Spiritual Mothering

Spiritual Mothering

Susan Hunt

Drawing on Titus 2, this classic book encourages both younger and older women to seek out godly mentoring relationships and experience the blessing of such spiritual mothering with the aim of producing fruit for God’s glory.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:50 - Informational and Relational Discipleship

Matt Tully
Susan, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Susan Hunt
Thank you for having me, Matt.

Matt Tully
What’s your first memory of reading the Bible with an older woman?

Susan Hunt
Good question. I think it would’ve been with my friend Georgia Settle, who was such a spiritual mother to me when I didn’t know I needed one. I did not have the language to identify what she was, but watching her and listening to her, and seeing her love for the Lord and his word was such a comfort and blessing to me, and her influence still resonates in my life.

Matt Tully
Did you grow up in a Christian home?

Susan Hunt
I did. But I’m 82 years old, and this was back in the days when the mainline churches had become very liberal. We always went to church, but I never remember us reading the Bible at home. Later, my parents became committed Christians, but I was grown then. I did not actually come to know Jesus as my Savior until I was twenty-two, because I just had not heard the gospel.

Matt Tully
When would you say that was? How old were you when you started having these conversations and reading the Bible with this other lady?

Susan Hunt
It was about ten years after I became a Christian that she came into my life, and it was through us working together in women’s ministry in the PCA. And her influence on me was just remarkable. I did not realize it at the time; it was just the way she lived life. But gradually I came to understand. Her love had just enfolded me—her love for the word and her love for me and her encouragement to me. So it was not formal. It was very relational and informal, but at the same time, there was deep content there and she was teaching me much.

Matt Tully
I want to explore that difference between a formal relationship and an informal one but before we go there, it is amazing to me how often in the moment—in the day-to-day of our lives—we don’t maybe recognize the influence that someone is having on us, the shaping power that they’re having on us. It’s only when we look back that we see how God used that person. Has that been your experience throughout life?

Susan Hunt
Absolutely. And it’s one of the reasons that I feel so strongly about older women discipling younger women. And now I think we have more of the language and an understanding of that than we did when I was coming along as a young woman. We can be more intentional in helping women to have what I call a long view of life—to see the big story of God’s redemption story being written in our lives. And so, yes, I think it’s just so important that we have that perspective.

Matt Tully
Let’s speak a little bit to that formal versus informal dynamic, because I think sometimes as Christians—men and women—we can have an understanding of what discipleship looks like that is maybe pretty focused and certain. It’s spending thirty minutes reading the Bible together and studying a book of the Bible, and then it’s got to have a twenty minute prayer time. We can have all these things built off of what we’ve seen done or what we’ve experienced with someone else. How should we think about the value of formal versus informal and pursuing those things?

Susan Hunt
That’s an important distinction to make and to see the blend of all of that. I really think Paul captures it for us in the way he described his discipleship to the Thessalonians. He wrote this in 1 Thessalonians 2:

“We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.”

Now, if we look at this we see, number one, that Paul likened discipleship to nurturing, like a nursing mother, which is similar to the Titus 2 principle of older women teaching and training younger women. So we see that nurturing, or relational, aspect of discipleship. But he goes on to say, “we shared not only the gospel but also ourselves.” So, number two, the gospel is shared. There’s intentionality in sharing the information of the gospel.

Matt Tully
It’s not just hanging out.

Susan Hunt
Exactly. It’s not just doing lunch together. But at the same time, he was sharing himself. So there is this informational and relational aspect, which is so important to realize. If it’s just informational, it’s going to be academic. But if it’s just relational, it’s going to be anemic.
And it’s not always that at every time you’re together there’s equal amounts of each. But in the big picture of it, there will be both the information being shared as well as the relationship being developed. And even sometimes, when this is being done within the ministry of the church—specifically, from my perspective, which is within the women’s ministry—there may be some women who are doing more of the informational part even as older women are mobilized to do the relational part.

Matt Tully
So different people can play different roles in this.

Susan Hunt
Absolutely.

Matt Tully
It’s a team effort.

Susan Hunt
Yes. Which means this is a covenantal community aspect. Discipleship happens in the context of covenant life.

Matt Tully
So often we think of discipleship—when we actually do think of discipleship—we think of it as a one-on-one kind of thing. But would you want to push back against that and relocate it in the context of the community?

Susan Hunt
I definitely would because that’s always been a bit odd to me because Jesus discipled a small group as they walked along the way, as they lived life together. There was both content and relationship. And my experience over all these years has been that when it begins to happen in this balanced way and in this bigger picture way of some women perhaps doing more of the Bible teaching while others are mobilized to do the relationship building, then it goes deeper and lasts longer, and it actually begins to affect the culture in a church. A community culture develops. Just earlier this week I was in a Bible study in my own church where the Bible study leader was talking about covenant community and asked if anybody had any examples. And one of the women spoke up and said, Thirty years ago when I came into church, I was not a Christian, and I came to know Jesus and I got involved in the women’s Bible study. Susan and Farstine taught me what it meant to be a Christian woman—to live the Christian life when I had children and how to be a mother to those children. And she continued on, and then I said to her, I want everybody to hear what she just said: Susan and Farstine. At that point in my life, I was very busy. I was working outside the home. I taught the Bible study. But it was Farstine that showed her day by day and situation by situation how to apply what we were learning into her life as a wife, as a mother, as a woman.

Matt Tully
Do you think churches tend towards one or the other—the relationship side or the teaching side? Have you observed that one is more dominant in our church culture today?

Susan Hunt
Yes, I definitely think so. And much of it will depend on the leadership and which way they lean. But leadership needs to stand back and remember Paul’s words and to look and see Are we balancing this and are we utilizing the giftedness of the people who are strong with teaching, but being sure they’re paired up with women who can also do the relational building? And I think that the same thing would apply with men, obviously, but there needs to be both. But we need to teach people there needs to be both. They’re not just going to figure this out by themselves. And so we need to teach that approach to discipleship.

09:59 - The Gospel Imperative of Titus 2

Matt Tully
Nearly thirty years ago now, you write in your book that “the gospel imperative of Titus 2:3–5 reached out and grabbed [your] heart.” That’s the language that you use. So I wonder if you could read that passage for us and then share a little bit more about how it impacted you.

Susan Hunt
Titus 2:1: “As for you, [speaking to Titus] teach what accords with sound doctrine.” And then verse 3: “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.” Now, at that point in my life, I had just become the coordinator of women’s ministry for the PCA, and Georgia Settle was on the committee. She was the one who had carried women’s ministry in the PCA up to that point. And she was my spiritual mother, though I did not have that language. At one point, we were talking about how we must discover what the Bible says about women’s ministry: Why should a church have a women’s ministry in the church? There were no resources then. This was almost fifty years ago. And so there were no conferences and none of those things.

Matt Tully
We’re at TGC Women’s right now. Could you even imagine something like this existing then?

Susan Hunt
I really could not. We dreamed big but not this big. I could not imagine that it would become worldwide as it has. But we landed on this passage because it seemed the most obvious passage. And my first thought was, Okay, if we can find a way to get older and younger women to connect and if we can write some lessons on the behaviors and virtues that are mentioned, then maybe we can check this off our list and move on. But then with Georgia’s encouragement, we took a bigger look at it: How does this passage connect with the bigger story of redemption? What is the context—the immediate context, as well as the whole context of the whole Bible? And with that, I began going deeper and deeper, and it just exploded in my heart and in my mind. First of all, we saw that this was written to the pastor, and so this was not just a woman’s thing; this was a church thing.

Matt Tully
Is that something that you feel like churches and pastors can think sometimes, that women’s ministry is something that the women can focus on and pastors don’t have to?

Susan Hunt
Absolutely.

Matt Tully
So you think that’s a problem?

Susan Hunt
Absolutely. I think because we tend to just pick out verses 3–5, and it is not just a women’s thing. A women’s ministry is one part of the discipleship ministry of the entire church. And a women’s ministry is not just about building a strong women’s ministry; it’s about building a strong church, by obeying what we’re given here in this mandate, which is one of the pastoral epistles. It was written to tell pastors how to have strong, healthy churches. And so don’t push women’s ministry to the side, but see it as an integral part of What God’s calling us to be.

Matt Tully
Can I ask a question on that? As you’ve talked with pastors over the years about women’s ministry, what have been some of the reservations or the stumbling blocks that they have expressed when it comes to effectively shepherding their women’s ministries?

Susan Hunt
As much as I hate to say it, much of it has been because they’ve had really bad experiences with women’s ministry. I grieve over that and I understand it, because too many times a women’s ministry does not understand that they’re one part of the local church and they begin to take on a momentum of their own and to try to build their own dynasty rather than to try to build up the church. Or, one woman will have an agenda, and that becomes contrary to the agenda of the church. So, there are many reasons that pastors have been frightened about women’s ministry, and I’m very grateful that Ligon Duncan partnered with me years ago to write Women’s Ministry in the Local Church so that our combined voices could give the biblical foundations for women’s ministry to help church male leadership, as well as women, to understand. And Titus 2 is a significant part of that, but it’s not the only part.

Matt Tully
You write in the book that “Countless women today long to be nurtured. They want to feel the warmth and security of an older woman’s approval, but they don’t know how to do it.” And I’m sure there are many listeners—women, but also men—who would say, I feel that same way. You wrote that many years ago. Do you think the situation has improved over the last three decades? Has it gotten worse, or has it maybe stayed the same?

Susan Hunt
I’d probably say both.

Matt Tully All of the above.

Susan Hunt
Yes, all of the above. In many places it has definitely improved, because we see church leadership and women’s ministries going hand in hand and working together, and that brings me so much joy. But there are still others who are operating in that other dimension where they do not see the connection between church life and women’s ministry, or church leadership in women’s ministry. And as the church has grown and I think as we have seen the church grow, as we’ve seen ministries grow, too often they have been parallel tracks rather than the one track. But I just have so much hope, because I think increasingly we are seeing churches and church leadership beginning to understand the importance of them having a women’s ministry.

16:28 - Women’s Ministry as a Part of the Broader Life of the Church

Matt Tully
You start to talk about church leadership being involved in helping to shape and direct women’s ministry, and viewing women’s ministry and discipleship as a part of the broader church’s life. What would you say to the women who hear that and maybe, frankly, feel skeptical that that’s a good idea? Maybe they feel like they have been burned by church leadership in some way or mistreated. They look around at the church right now and we can see many stories where women have been mistreated and not cherished and valued the way that they should have been. What would you say to that woman right now?

Susan Hunt
God’s way is the good way and the right way. I understand that pain just as I understand the pain of pastors who have been wounded by women. I also certainly understand women who have been wounded by church leadership. But it does not mean that we do not work hard to come back to the basic principles of how God tells us to live and to work together within his church. We come back to Scripture as our basis. I think we just have to work very hard at that. We have to be willing to repent where we’ve been wronged, to forgive where we’ve been wronged, and to work together. I just challenge and plead with both men and women to come back to the basics. It’s really not complicated, but it’s not easy, because it is so much about repenting and forgiving because we keep messing up at every level. But let’s keep doing it because it’s the right way. Living covenantally is so beautiful, but living covenantally involves daily repentance and forgiveness.

18:26 - Biblical Womanhood: Against the Current of Culture

Matt Tully
In so many ways, it seems like our culture today—within the church to some extent, but certainly outside of the church—our culture is so confused about what it means to be a woman. We see that every day in many different ways. And the notion that God designed men and women differently, to have distinct roles and yet complimentary beautiful roles both in their families and in our churches, is often considered very passe in our culture, even among Christians. What would you say to that? How would you articulate the beauty of the distinctiveness of what it means to be a woman today?

Susan Hunt
We are going against the current to even say such things, but doesn’t the gospel always go against the current? So, what I would say is come back to the gospel. Come back to the beauty and the truth and the wonder of redemption. God has redeemed manhood and womanhood. Yes, we will be going against the current to live that out, particularly in our environment today. But at the same time, it’s right, just as every aspect of living out the gospel is against the current of this world. But it’s with the current of the world to come of the world that’s in our hearts, of the redemption that’s in our hearts. So there’s a real sense in which we reconnect with who we really are when we reconnect with a biblical perspective of manhood and womanhood. We reconnect with who God created, designed, and redeemed us to be. I hear so much about “be your authentic self,” and I’m not sure what people mean about that, but my authentic self is ugly. It’s my redeemed self that I need to stay connected with by staying connected with Jesus, who is building up that redemption in me. So I would just say come back to the gospel. Come back to the Scriptures. Come back to what’s true and good and beautiful and right, and all the aspects of our Christian life will gradually fall into place.

Matt Tully
You’ve already said that you’re eighty-two years old, so you’ve been around for a long time and you’ve seen a lot. Do you think the situation today about the understanding of what it means to be a woman, does it feel different than what it was in the past? Does it feel like we are in more difficult waters, or is that overblown in terms of the way we think about these things?

Susan Hunt
Well, again, I would say yes and no. In many ways, it is more difficult because the contrast is more striking. But early on for me, it was easy to be complacent because most women did fall into what the outward manifestations of womanhood may be, so we did not take a hard look at the inner manifestations of our heart. We looked at our behavior rather than our heart. Today, we are really challenged. We can’t really deal with our behavior until we deal with our heart, and that’s more striking to us now. And so I’m not sure which is better. This is where God has us now, and so this is where we are to glorify and enjoy him by reflecting his redemption design for us as women and as men.

22:07 - What Makes a Good Mentor?

Matt Tully
Taking a step back and speaking about mentoring in particular again, what makes for a good mentor? What are a few of the key characteristics of a spiritual mother?

Susan Hunt
I think it’s a woman whose heart desire is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

Matt Tully
To some that will be a recognizable phrase. Where did you get that?

Susan Hunt
The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. I was in my early 30s, fairly young Christian, when I was captivated by that. What does that mean? And as I began thinking about it and praying about it, I gradually began to realize if this is true, then every situation, every life situation, every life season is a glorious opportunity to glorify and enjoy God. And that’s been a lifelong process of learning what does that mean right here, right now in the situation I’m in? What will it look like for me to glorify God and to enjoy him? And it’s really been in these last few years that the enjoying him has become as significant to me as the glorifying him. And it’s just been glorious to see.

Matt Tully
Why do you think that is? What has it been about the last few years?

Susan Hunt
Well, it was actually writing the book Aging with Grace. As my friend Sharon Betters and I studied Psalm 92, which says “The righteous will flourish even in old age,” we began to ask, What does that mean? How will we glorify and enjoy God in old age? And I began praying, Lord, show me how to do this. And what surprised me, as I prayed Psalm 92 into my life, was it was not just that I learned more about glorifying him now, but the joy came. And it was particularly obvious to me when we were almost through writing that book, my husband became ill and two months later went to be with Jesus. I had been praying Psalm 92 into my life for almost a year, and it just shocked me when instead of being afraid, I was filled with gratitude and with joy. I was filled with the joy of his presence with me, and then I was filled with the joy of his presence with Jesus. And Jesus just took me to a different level of experiencing that joy. And so it’s just been amazing to me, and I’m so very grateful. It’s really like Spiritual Mothering, which was written twenty-five years ago. Sharon and I kept saying, This is still spiritual mothering, but now we’re showing them what the last phase is like and how we can continue to be spiritual mothers in this last phase.

Matt Tully
That’s such an encouraging word because I think for many of us, and maybe most of us, we view old age as, at its core, a series of losses. We lose the ability to do certain things; we lose independence, perhaps; we lose our spouses. It just feels like loss, loss, loss. But hearing you talk, it sounds like it’s through those losses, perhaps, that God has opened up new vistas of relationship that you hadn’t experienced before.

Susan Hunt
It has just been amazing to me as I’ve prayed, Lord, help me to flourish, to be spiritually productive. And flourishing does not mean doing more; it means becoming more like Jesus. And as I’ve prayed this and prayed for the fruit of the Spirit to be more real in my life, prayed for his joy and his peace and for all of these things to become the reality of my experience, he’s done that. This means I have more to give to young women now. It looks different. I don’t have the physical stamina to teach a weekly Bible study. But about a month after my husband died, I was just sitting with my Bible one day and I said, Lord, what do I do now? What do I do? And the thought came into my head, Open the door to those that I will bring to you. And I thought, Well, I can do that. And young women whom I had discipled started calling and saying, Can I come over and visit? And then more started. And some now come from out of town and spend the night with me. And we just sit and have what I call “couch conversations.” And do you know it’s the sweetest, sweetest means of discipleship? I’m not standing in front of a group speaking at big conferences very often. That’s a very seldom thing for me. But, oh the rich times I have with two or three women sitting around my table! I can’t even make lunch for them anymore, so they’ll call and say, Can we bring lunch over? And they come and bring lunch and we just sit and talk. It’s so sweet. And I will tell you that I really think that these years are my most productive years. I’m knowing Jesus in a deeper and sweeter way. Sometimes I can almost smell heaven. The veil gets very thin.

28:12 - How to Encourage Spiritual Mothering

Matt Tully
Wow. Maybe as a final question, Susan, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your husband, and speak to the men listening right now—the husbands, the pastors—what is it that they can do to help encourage women to be discipling one another, to encourage these spiritual mothering relationships and be the greatest advocates for women’s discipleship in their homes and in their churches?

Susan Hunt
Oh, my. I could talk for a whole podcast about him. First of all, he was the first one that wanted women’s ministry in our church. He was a church planter, and at one point he said, We really need a women’s Bible study to begin to help these women get to know one another and to understand the theology that I’m preaching from the pulpit. And I want you to teach the Bible study. And I had no desire to teach a women’s Bible study. None!

Matt Tully
So he was the first person to kind of push you to that?

Susan Hunt
Absolutely. I understood his logic and I was agreeing with him until he said, I want you to teach it. But then I realized he really didn’t have anyone else, and it lit a fire in my heart. It’s when I begin to see, Oh, wow! This changes a church. This changes the dynamic of a church. As those women get to know one another, as they understand what he’s preaching from the pulpit and how to apply it in their lives, it’s changing our church. And so that was the first way. But then as I became involved in women’s ministry on the denominational level and it was requiring a lot from me and it meant some traveling, Gene hated me being away from home. He just did not function well when I was away from home. But he would say to me, We can do this because this is God’s calling on your life and I believe you’re to do it, and so we’ll do it. And it was never about me; it was always we. And his support and encouragement to the very end was there. Even when I would go on out of the country trips where I would be away—sometimes he could go with me, but sometimes he couldn’t—but he encouraged me to do it because he knew it was God’s calling on our lives. So, support women’s ministry. For the men out there, pray for your wives and for the women in your church. Support, encourage, value, and see it as essential to developing a culture of covenant life in your church.

Matt Tully
Susan, thank you so much for talking with me today about this really important topic, and a wonderful topic. Your example over decades has been so helpful for so many of us.

Susan Hunt
Thank you very much, Matt.

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