In this series of articles about Romans, I’m planning to jump around. It’s because I buy into Scot McKnight’s view that the book is much more understandable when reading it backwards – digging early on into the effective conclusions in the final few chapters.

Some read Romans as though Paul was writing it to defend Calvinist views of protestantism in the 16th century, but in fact he was writing it with the pastoral intent of getting Jews and Gentiles in the Roman church to worship together in harmony.

It’s definitely a work of theology, bringing together what God was doing with the Israelites in the Old Testament with the bigger picture established in the New. And I’ll be digging into all this during the coming instalments.

But today I’m taking a slight digression by writing about the final chapter of Romans, which contains Paul signing off.

The chapter is significant in the old debate over women in church leadership roles, which has been reheated as “complementarism”, a euphemism that has propagated over the internet. Complementarians claim that although men and women are morally equal, the Bible – principally through some (misunderstood) comments by Paul – says they shouldn’t be leaders in churches or preach.

But Romans 16 suggests that this was never Paul’s view.

There are three striking facts to note in Paul’s chapter. The first is that Paul has entrusted Phoebe, a woman in church leadership to verbally deliver Paul’s letter in Roman. She is described as “a deacon of the church in Cenchreae” and the role she is performing for Paul is, effectively, to preach.

The second is a mention of Priscilla, a missionary who is often thought of as some form of church leader, who helped convert the Jewish intellectual Apollos to Christianity.

The third is that he describes Junia, a woman, as an apostle.

Paul clearly did not discriminate himself against women in positions of church responsibility.

Women, of course, have been leaders in the Anglican Communion for some time. The earliest was Florence Li Tim-Oi (pictured), who was ordained in Hong Kong in World War II because there was shortage. As a more general rule, there have been female Anglican priests in Hong Kong and Macao since 1971.

Here in England, women could be ordained as deacons from 1987. The following decade, 32 women were ordained as full priests in March 1994, the impetus for the BBC’s much-loved comedy series The Vicar of Dibley, which launched that November.