Welcome to WOMEN and the St. Nina Quarterly.

The Women’s Orthodox Ministries and Education Network (WOMEN) was founded in Colorado in 1995 as a non-profit organization. The prime goal of WOMEN is to offer encouragement and support to Orthodox women worldwide in their service to the Church. Networking is WOMEN’s only product. This is accomplished in two ways—by supporting the publication of the St. Nina Quarterly in print and electronic form, and by promoting and publicizing conferences about subjects of interest to women.

Greetings in Jesus Christ, dear sisters and brothers. May the blessing of Great Lent and the joy of the Holy Resurrection of Our Lord God and Savior fill you during this most sacred season.

I’ve been engaged in a lot of reflection during Great Lent. One result is that recently I sent a letter to the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland, reviewing the fruits of the $5000 grant they gave to WOMEN in 1995 to assist its founding.

WOMEN’s Colorado mailbox is receiving about ten new inquiries and five e-mails a week. Positive responses to the St. Nina Quarterly are arriving from all over the world. Best of all, suggestions and reports of how folks are using the St. Nina Quarterly to enhance their local efforts are exciting. For example, one woman wrote to say that she plans to put out sample copies of the St. Nina Quarterly at her annual church festival this summer with a sign-up sheet for membership that she will forward to us. She suggests that others may want to do the same. Another recommended that we circulate information about the Quarterly at the different jurisdictions’ clergy-laity meetings and at conferences and seminars. We’re happy to provide materials to anyone who would be willing to distribute them for us at such events.

The Internet is a network of computers that has helped to facilitate instant global communication on almost any topic. Virtual Sisterhood is a gender-related electronic forum on the Internet that offers a list of women’s networks throughout the world about all manner of subjects, but with one thing in common—a desire for increased global communications. In recent weeks I’ve browsed the Internet, and discovered that Orthodox women have no such global network in place. Since such a network would greatly enhance WOMEN’s goal of lifting up women’s ministry in the Church, we have decided to spend a good part of our energy over the next year in trying to establish such an interactive network.

In every Divine Liturgy after the sacrament of Holy Communion, Orthodox Christians throughout the world sing some version of the hymn, “We have seen the true light, we have received the Heavenly Spirit, we have found the true faith, by worshipping the undivided Trinity, Who has saved us.” Cleansed and fortified as one community of faithful, our minds and strength renewed and reoriented once again to our spiritual center, we travel back onto the pathways of our daily lives, seeing with spiritual eyes, and giving each other and our communities the best of ourselves as we go about our activities. The sense of community as being the natural environment for our faith and our praxis (practice) is presupposed in our Church.