The New Look of Women's Ministry
Karen Mains
October 1, 1983
"How can we attract younger women to our mission society?" This is a question I have heard frequently enough to make me realize that traditional women's mission societies are seeing attendance lag and the generation gap widen.
When the question is addressed to me, it usually makes me uneasy-because at the tender age of nineteen, as a young bride, I was one of those who abandoned the WMS.
I remember the tearful frustration as I explained to my new husband, a member of our church's pastoral staff, why I was not going to go to any more women's meetings.
Five years later the frustration was resurrected when, as a dutiful pastor's wife in a large inner-city congregation, I attempted to make regular visits to the Scatter Sunshine Sewing Circle. Here the older women undertook handwork and boasted about their grandchildren.
Somehow, sitting in the inner city on the edge of the drug and hippie center, during the era when race riots were destroying whole blocks of Chicago's West Side, while students burned campuses and my contemporaries were being jailed for resisting service in the Vietnam war-somehow, the Scatter Sunshine Sewing Circle seemed highly irrelevant.
"How can we attract younger women to our mission society?" my questioner, the national president of a denominational WMS, asks as we sit together on a terrace in the warm California sunshine.
Is she aware of my checkered past?
"Oh, yes," she replies openly. "That's why my board felt you would be one of the women most qualified to answer the question."
I've given much thought to the issue since that day. While I am sure many women's missionary societies are thriving, I am also sure there has been a shift in the thinking process of the modern church women. It affects not just the WMS ...
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