This book began in 1993 when the Communityof the Sisters of the Church, an order of Anglican sisters a Glebe, (in Sydney, Australia), asked me to give a talk to their chapter meeting. I decided that, as they were a group of very positive and determined women, struggling to regain some of the momentum they had lost with the closure of their St Catharine's School, a fresh examination of the status and ministry of women in the New Testament and how even God approved of the way they went against many of the sicial and religious constraints of their time, would be useful to them.