Recently the OCA issued a statement regarding the liturgical service of girls in the altar.

The text below was originally sent as an email to members. The main response was submitted to the OCA for publication in their newspaper. It was not published. Since there did/does not seem to be any formal mechanism to let the hierarchy know the thoughts and feelings of those in their flock, we have collected a number of responses to this policy that are included. (We had asked for anonymous submissions but some people included their names so they were included in the composite response. In general, they have not been edited.) They represent the thoughts and in some cases, frustrations of many regarding this issue.

The question of the participation of women in the liturgical and priestly ministry of the Orthodox Church is a relatively new question, one which has come to it from the “outside.” Yet, for the last 30 years, the question has been seriously considered by Orthodox theologians who have made it our own. This is true of theologians who both oppose and support a greater participation of women in liturgical service.

As Orthodox Christians we believe that human beings—men and women—are created in the image of God and called to grow into God’s likeness. But who is God? We believe that God, as Trinity, is a community of Persons in love. It is because of this love that God created the world out of nothingness and continues to act in history, through the Holy Spirit, recreating our world. We believe that union with God is what real life is. It is participation in this Life that is the goal of our lives as Christians.

As Orthodox Christians we believe that human beings—men and women—are created in the image and likeness of God. Because we also believe in the Trinity, a divine community of Persons, we believe that in order to be truly human, we must be community. As Sister Nonna Harrison states in her article, The Holy Trinity as a Model for Human Community,

…to be made in the image of God is to be made in the image of the Holy Trinity; like the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, human beings are persons. This means that we are free and are able to know and love others, but it also means that our belonging to the community of humankind, our relatedness to other people, is at the very root of who we are.

The very title of this year's annual meeting—“Invisible No More?”—speaks both to the backseat role which women historically have played within Christianity and, with its interrogative punctuation, to the uncertainty regarding our roles both present and future. The increasing attention being paid to the place of women in the Church is at once both a positive development in its reevaluation of long-held practices and yet a reminder of the limitations placed on women's active participation in the life of the Church. There has never been a similar discussion of the role of men within the Church for the simple reason that men have never been limited in their ecclesial participation.