"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 ...