What makes a good elder’s wife? Thankfully, we’re not left to wonder—as she “must be reverent, not slanderers, temperate, faithful in all things” (1 Tim. 3:11). In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm welcome guest Alexander Strauch to break down these four elements. Strauch explains that an elder’s wife must, first, be worthy of respect. Second, she must not hurt others through loose or malicious talk. Third, she must be characterized by sound and stable judgment. And, finally, like the Proverbs 31 woman, she must show herself faithful in all her pursuits (Prov. 31:11). Perfection is not the standard—yet these qualities are what’s needed in an elder’s helpmeet. 

Today we're going to talk about a very unusual, hardly talked about subject. It's the bivocational pastor's wife, Alexander Strouk, is writing a book on it. Hope you enjoy the discussion. So Jason, I called Deborah this morning, my wife, and I was asking her what I should say, you know, on this podcast about elders' wives, and I'll give you some of the bullet points real quick. She said she should not be too needy a woman.

In other words, she needs to make decisions. She understands the nuances of submission, and she can't be completely dependent on her husband for her life. Second thing she says, she said that she needs to understand that her husband also belongs to the church. This has to be a healthy balance. He can't neglect his family.

But her husband isn't like a programmer, you know. Her husband is different. Other people need a piece of him. What she said is in some ways, you know, the church owns him in a different way than the, you know, the programmer is owned by, you know, by his employer. And then she said she must be a helper to her husband.

And she said a lot of other things, but I'll stop there. Now that's a great start. Now that is so good. Can you send that to me? I'll send you my list.

Hey, by the way, we have Alexander Strzok on this podcast. He's introducing himself outstanding. He's introducing himself, yeah. Alex is like one of our heroes, like long-time heroes. We were reading his books a long time before we knew him.

And then he went and changed it and did this new revision on biblical eldership. So I'm sure it's a big upgrade. Yeah, so just an opportunity to publicly thank you for allowing the rights to translate that into the native language of Malawi. We've been working with Brethren in Malawi for the last 15 years. And out in the villages they don't speak English, they have very little access to good works, and so the people we're working with are translating a few important works for availability in Chichewa.

And so thank you for letting us translate this book. They're getting started on it right now. They're very excited about it. Wonderful. So Alex is writing a book on Elders wives.

Okay. There aren't very many resources out there on elders' wives, so I'm pretty thrilled that he's doing this. Such an important topic. 1 Timothy 3 is famous for being qualifications for elders, but if you're really familiar with the text, you know there are actually qualifications for elders' wives, too. I thought I would just read that, 1 Timothy 3 verse 11, likewise their wives must be reverent, not slanderers, temperate, faithful in all things.

So elders ought to be remarkable men in certain ways, but elders' wives are remarkable women. Yeah. So Alex, what moved you to write this book about wives? Well, let me just say, there are books out there for the wives of pastors. There's a number of them.

I've read three of them right now. This book aims specifically for the wives of elders who are self-supporting, have a regular job, and yet shepherd the church. So we're aiming at that group of women. The other thing is it's going to be more Bible exposition like brother Jason just read first Timothy 311 to us. Well, we're going to go through those qualifications very carefully.

The books that I have read are all mainly illustrations of experiences. So we're getting into the text of Proverbs, 1st Timothy, and I think you will really like that, brother, that it's really biblically based. Isn't this, this is why we like Alex. He goes to the Bible first, he doesn't go to a bunch of philosophies and experiences and things like that. So if you're listening and you haven't read his books, it starts with careful exposition, That's what we loved about biblical elderships.

It starts with the flagship text in the New Testament about eldership and just gives you a phrase by phrase baseline of what those texts mean and how to apply them. So bivocational wives, bivocational. Now, what's the percentage of bivocational pastors in America? Of bivocational pastors? It's growing.

It's growing. In fact, a friend of mine who is in the Southern Baptist Movement who plants churches told me just recently, we're telling these new church planters they have to be by vocational because the money isn't there. Price of land, price of buildings, everything is just escalated at a proportion. And so a small group starting out cannot afford the salaries and these salaries today are in a different category than when I have anything I knew like in our area here, you have to be making 100 thousand to 150 thousand to survive. You can't buy a house with that.

That's not even possible. So unless you've got some very wealthy people, you're going to have to start out by vocational until the church grows. So that is just one of the realities of how economically our country has changed. And let me give you one illustration. My house cost me 35 years ago, $100, 000.

It is 800 today. That's out of sight of any young couple or whether you've gone to college or anything like that. So changing times means we have to change. Now I think I believe that bivocational pastors are a majority in the churches in America. And I've read different numbers, you know, from the high fifties to the high sixties, sixty percent, sixty-five, even seventy percent.

So I'm not sure what the number is, but you're talking to the majority of pastors, and I don't think there's a book that's focused on the bivocational pastor's wife. Well, remember, all the other elders earn their own keep and are self-supporting. So really the vast majority of elders, the wives have to deal with them going to work all day, helping the family, helping the church. So it's a different category than when your husband is full-time, has a lot of liberty and changing his schedule, can race home or do this or that. Of course, that can become a problem too.

I've seen that as a problem. So we're aiming at those women. And you and your daughter are writing this book, right? Yes. Now you're probably wondering why am I writing a book about women?

Well, I'm doing the exegetical side. She's doing the direct application and voice of the women in it. I don't want it to be just my voice. I didn't even want to be one of the authors, but she says, no, no, that's not right. If you're doing that, you're so it'll be father and daughter.

Fantastic. So walk us through some of the things you want to say in this book. Well, one thing is we're starting the book with the verse that Jason just quoted, 1 Timothy 3 11. And the last qualification is probably going to be the title of the book, Faithful in All Things. Isn't that a beautiful phrase?

You want a wife who is faithful. He doesn't just say faithful in God, does he? He says faithful in all things, the Lord, the word of God, the family, the wife, the woman working in the church, whatever her responsibilities are, faithful in all aspects of life. I just find that a beautiful phrase. And then she must be worthy of respect.

In other words, a woman who is honored and esteemed by the congregation. Interesting, he brings up this thing of slander. We have a whole chapter on the tongue. An elder's wife cannot, we must say this absolutely, be a gossip, a backbiter, an over-talker. It cannot happen.

It will destroy his reputation and it will destroy the church. So she must be a woman who has control of her speech. Very, very important. Well, well, and Alex, the other element there is how much wives of elders know about what's going on in the church that the average person doesn't know by virtue of being the wife of the elder. Elders have all sorts of visibility, and if you've been an elder very long at all, you know part of your job is to know how to keep your mouth shut.

But you speak to your wife about these things because she's your helper and your most trusted counselor in most cases, and so they have to be able to be very discreet with that information because they have access to all sorts of knowledge that other people in the church don't have and shouldn't have. No, that's a very important point. It can literally tear a church to pieces if wrong information gets out. So she's a confidential person. Why don't you walk us through the list and just give us your take on each of those elements?

I'm hoping this podcast can be helpful for the Biblical Casual Elder's wife herself. Well, I've got my Bible right in front of me here, and in verse 11, their wives must be dignified. Actually, that's an OK translation, but it has so many other implications. I think the simplest is worthy of respect. An elder's wife must be worthy of respect.

She's a woman esteemed by the church. She's honored by the church. Now listen to this. She's trusted by the church and people respect her. The same word is used of the deacons.

The deacon must be worthy of the respect. When you go back to the elders' qualification, it says respectable. So she's a public person. Even if she's not a speaker or a Bible teacher, just Her presence makes her a public figure. And they have to understand that.

Some women, oh, I don't want to be a public figure. Well, you have spiritual influence. Remember we talked about that at the conference? An elder's wife has influence and more than she realizes. And it's good that she starts realizing just her faithfulness in coming to church regularly, supporting her husband, caring for her children, praying for the church makes her worthy of respect.

She doesn't have to be superwoman. We don't want to put burdens on women that are totally unrealistic. And one of the things you'll read in all the books on the pastor's wives is that they're the second person in the church and all these expectations on these poor women. And every woman's different. Some women can bear a very heavy load.

Other women are overwhelmed, very easy. We don't want to destroy sisters. So a sister needs to realize she's a woman that's respected. That's the first qualification. The second one is my text says not slanderous.

You go over to Titus, same thing he said of the older woman, not slanderous. One of the translations says, a malevolent talker, a malevolent, the word is used negatively of someone who hurts, destroys, does negative things, not a slanderer, or a malicious talker, or a backbiter. Someone who has a loose tongue, someone who doesn't have control of the tongue. Boy, when you get to James, James says, if you can't bridle your tongue, your religion is worthless. Can you imagine such a statement?

Your religion is worthless. That's how important the tongue is. I see when you go to Proverbs, and we're given a lot of Proverbs in here, Proverbs, the most frequent subject in Proverbs is the tongue, the lips, which are all figures of speech called metonymy for speaking. And the power of the tongue. Now, I've only mentioned the negative but remember the tongue has a positive side.

It can uplift. It can encourage Paul says it can show grace. It can build up the tongue is powerful. Our speech is powerful, never underestimated. We can, a word in right time, the proverb says, a word in time, oh what an encouragement it is.

So let's use our speech, as Paul says in Ephesians 4, let no corrupting talk come out of your mouth, only what is good for building up. And this is an interesting thing, giving grace, no other places they say that, their tongue can do that. So we go into all these things about the power of the tongue for the negative and for positive and a woman who can control her tongue is is going to honor her husband. As the proverb says, he'll be honored in the gate. And by the way, proverb also says that she'll be honored in the gate.

In other words, her worthy reputation builds up her husband, and she herself is honored in the gate. Yeah, so the fruit of the spirit is self-control. That's right. A very important one, isn't it? So what else?

All right, then we have next, not slanderous, sober-minded. Now, in the Greek language, a word can have expanded ideas to it more than in English. So some of these words have these expanded words that we have to use more English words to sort of bring out the full well roundedness. So this is a very important qualification. It's a qualification for an elder too.

The word often has been used for sober in the use of wine. However, because Paul already has talked about wine, too much wine, both for elders and deacons, it would be a repetition. So most commentators take this figuratively in the sense of balanced, balanced judgment, levelheadedness. Can you think of anything more important than that? Then, well, as Jason just said, the wife has an enormous influence on her husband, enormous.

And she may not even know it, the influence she has on her husband. Would we want the wife of an elder to be unbalanced, emotionally unstable, or I like the idea of extremism. A person that goes to extremes, that's not balanced. We want a person emotionally and mentally balanced, level headed, clear headed. Now, I think there's a very important qualification because it comes true for the elder too.

When you're in leadership, you've got to be a balanced person. You can't be run off this end of the ship, run off that end of the ship. And some people, because they're unbalanced, lose their emotions and they can become very hurtful of people. They talk with rough talk and they get emotionally angry. Just happened to me Sunday morning.

Man just came at me full blast yelling in my face. He's unbalanced. He's not a balanced person. He cannot be a lead in the church. Then I saw him do it to someone else.

The elders already written to him. I'm not an elder in our church hired years ago. But anyway, You've got to have stability. If you have stable leaders, some of the translations say sensible. That's good too.

If you have stable leaders, you're going to have a stable church. If you have extremist leaders, which is a problem in American politics right now. We got these wild extremes and these people are prepared to kill and they have killed. So to me, sober minded is important one. Yeah.

And I think that really plays into the pressures on a pastor's wife. She's got to be able to handle criticism without bitterness. And her stability, you know, some people are too vulnerable to criticism. They take criticism way too seriously, and it destroys them. And so, you know, a pastor's wife has to recognize those pressures and not let the criticism that her husband gets or that she herself gets draw her into bitterness.

And that's this sober-minded person. Yeah, I was really going to head down that same track, which was to say that in this sense, it's harder to be an elder's wife than it is to be an elder. An elder takes the arrows, and it is actually easier to be the one taking the elders than to be beside someone that you love who's taking the arrows. When you take the arrows, you can address that however you think you ought to address that. You can ignore it or respond to it or whatever you think should be done.

But when someone that you love is getting, is taking the incoming fire, you have so much less recourse and you're not involved in the conversations that happen after that. And so it's a really difficult position to be in because they love their husbands and they know their husbands to be better than they're spoken of. And so it's hard to sit by that scenario. So if you have a hothead, there's going to be a lot of fuel for hotheadedness. Jason, I put that in the same words you put it there.

I'm in an elders meeting, I get criticized, I'm there, I can fight back, tell my wife she can't do anything. And she goes, what are they saying that to you for? And then she gets, and then that could cause into backbiting and gossip because she wants the other ladies to know my husband has been falsely accused. And I don't think you can be in a position of leadership and before people without getting some accusation or criticism. I just don't know.

Maybe it is possible if you're, you know, maybe on too much medication or something. Okay, what's the next one? The last one is the most beautiful. It's all encompassing. And that's why I think we will name the book Faithful in all things.

I just can't think of a more beautiful statement to maid of my wife, faithful in all things. Not just with God, not just with the Bible, but with her husband, with her children, with her church, with her neighbors. You can trust her and her husband's heart. It even says that, I have to go find it in my notes here, the husband's heart trusts in her. How important is that I trust my wife.

And I can tell you about my wife. I trust her explicitly and she's not a talker. So we've been in Littleton Bible Chapel 56 years, 55 of those married. And this is going to be hard to believe, But I have never heard anyone criticize her. She doesn't get into fights.

She's a worker bee. She's out there to work. She's not into politics. And so in all these years, I know the women, well, she has the first qualification, worthy of respect. Worthy of respect.

There is no one in our church that has a complaint against her. Okay, so we're going to wrap this up, but I love the way you're going to end this book and title it about faithfulness, because this wife, she needs to be the kind of person where her husband wants to come home. She wants to be that kind of person because he this guy is overworked he's underpaid you know he doesn't feel great about the time investment, probably in either sector of his life. He's kind of on the ropes a lot. And it really matters if your wife is looking forward to you to come home, but that you're looking forward to come home to your wife so that you can get some respite from the war that you've been in.

By the way, I'm sorry I'm looking down, but I'm writing notes. You've given me some really good ideas and those suggestions by your wife, I would really like to get those. Maybe we can call her someday. Yeah, I'll send you a list. I've seen your wife this year for the first time.

I've just seen her, Pat, and she seems like a very lovely woman. Yeah, she's a very wise, very happy woman, very patient with her husband, very patient with her husband. Yes, well, I'm thankful. My condolences to her. So, a parting shot.

I think there's a tie-in to two of the flagship passages for mature Christian women as well. Titus 2, Proverbs 31. Those kind of women don't have to be elders' wives, but I think those, that elders' wives have to be those kind of women that have the respect that Alex was talking about, but also have the ability to take the younger wives and mothers, younger women under their wing to help them kind of pull them up into Christian maturity as older women in the church. Now mentioning that passage, Jason, I want to comment. I'm finishing up with Lexis a chapter on sex, because this is where we're seeing men falling in record numbers.

And so we need to address boldly sex in marriage and how it creates frustration and we're having way too many adulteries. Something's wrong here And we need to alert our brothers and sisters that they're just falling into the world. Maybe they're watching too many movies, I don't know. Our culture is so sex saturated, you start thinking it's normal. So we'll have a chapter on, and a lot of it is advice How to deal with the problems in the marriage when this comes talking it through cetera Hey, I want to talk about one more thing even though we're kind of over time here Alex You and I were talking about Lloyd Jones and his counsel To minister's wife and he he makes a comment that he believes that a pastor's wife should not have a special friend in the church.

She should be sort of a friend of all but not a special friend because it would perhaps, you know, open the door unnecessarily to envy and that type of thing. What are your thoughts on that? Yes, well, first of all, I don't agree with it. It's a half truth. And here's why.

That's clericalism. We're the professional class. The church is the family of God. It's the household of God. My closest and dearest friend of 55 years is a fellow elder with me.

However, however, we know the jealousy of the human heart. When we're in church, we hardly even look at each other. We're busy doing things. Our friendship, we are very careful in making it such that people would be jealous. We talk every day on the phone.

I don't go tell them the church. I don't say, oh, we talk to them. No, no, these are private things. So my wife has her sister and some other sisters very close. But when we're at church, You are a friend to everyone.

You minister to everyone. So that is true. But it's almost cruel that a woman can't have. And a woman needs other women that they share things with and that. And I encourage my wife with her friends, and just more than one.

But again, it's a half truth. It could be very hurtful to people. When I was in seminary, they taught those kinds of things. You should, a man should not, a pastor, now remember, I'm not into the one man pastor, the man at the top of the tomb pole. He should be a member of the eldership, even though he has more time for the work.

But we were told that you shouldn't have personal friends in the church. They should be outside the church. And then when you retire, you've got to leave the church. I've had this experience recently seeing this in a church. Well, that's clericalism.

You're the clergy, they're the laity. And you've got this eternal separation. So my children, my grandchildren, my best friends are all in the church. We're a family of God. Leaving it would be impossible to even think of.

So. Hey, you know, I read Lloyd-Jones comments to my wife And she said, well, Scott, it's a half truth. So you got it right. There you go. Fantastic.

Great. Wow. You can like, okay. Hey, Alex, I can't wait to get the book. I know a lot of people will get it.

And so we Really appreciate you taking the time to write it and then taking the time to talk to us about it. Always a joy to be with you. Amen. Thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. I hope you can join us next time, but I really hope to see you at our National Conference next May on manhood and womanhood, the glory of God in the creation order.

See you then. Strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com.