from a good friend who was a senior pastor in his congregational church. He challenged me to write him something defending a woman's right to preach the gospel. Within an hour or so, the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, "Is not God's Word the best defense and offense for any cause or proposed action of a human being?" I knew about 1 Timothy 2:12, which reads in part, "Suffer not a woman to teach." But I had never seen any expository research explaining this text in view of the fact that the Roman Empire was threatening to annihilate all of Christianity, so Paul did not want to further exacerbate the conflict by announcing a strategy for women to circulate the gospel. It is clear that women played a huge role in Paul's plan to spread the gospel clandestinely!

So I went about reconciling the competing views of 1 Timothy 2:12 to our duty as Christians to spread the gospel as Jesus enunciated in Matthew 28:19 to "go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations." Secondly, my next task was to make a diligent search of the Old and New Testament of the women who furthered God's plan to protect Israel from its enemies and to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ! There were more women who had served as military leaders, prophetesses, ministers, and political leaders than I had realized! The life and positions of King Deborah, Esther, Ruth, Anna the Baptist, Priscilla, and Phoebe, to name a few, were revealing to the mindset of God and the plan of Paul. A familiar analogy of this book is to ask the question that if a woman was the pastor of a church and her husband was the head deacon, if both were solidly in Christ, what would be the conflict?