As we bring the month of disciple making to a close, I’d like to introduce you to Women of Worth International and Marilyn Orton. In 1986 Marilyn attended the International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists, known as Amsterdam 86. She worked in the Prayer Room, and prayed with hundreds of the 10,000 participants. A few weeks after returning home the avalanche of mail began. For 17 years, she wrote letters of encouragement to some of the poorest evangelists in the world “just be a cheerleader for them and their ministries. They were doing so much with so little, while we in the Western world were doing so little with so much.”
In 2003 Marilyn and her daughter went to Nigeria. Over 100 of her evangelist’s friends were at the airport to greet them. They traveled throughout Nigeria for a month and it became evident that the women played a lesser role in the country, even in the churches. Marilyn began to ask “Do you have a Women’s Ministry?” The answer was usually “What is a Women’s Ministry?” Upon leaving Nigeria she agreed to come back to help her friends start a women’s ministry that would link their churches together.
In 2005 Marilyn returned with a program that took under an hour to write. It showed how to form a team under the leadership of their Pastor and divided the traditional roles of women within the church into seven groups whereby women could easily identify their spiritual gifts and use them to edify and build up the body in the local church. She named the program Women of Worth and before she knew it the program had spread like wildfire among all denominations. In 2006 the first, small national WOW Women’s Conference was held. The Pastors then wanted a men’s program and so the Marilyn Orton African Alliance (their chosen name, not hers) Leadership program was born. This summer WOW and MOAM are each expecting over two thousand people at their conferences.
WOW is now in 73 countries and is comprised of hundreds of coordinators and thousands of women, who are not only using their gifts within the local church, but are forming teams to take the Good News of the Gospel out into their communities. Hundreds have been led to Christ by WOW women.
Marilyn explains, “No persons or organization could have started, orchestrated, and spread Women of Worth International, for it is the vision of the Spirit of God. As He directs the work, we simply move forward in obedience trusting Him to do what only He can do. WOW is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our sight. To God be the glory – great things He has done!”
Recently, Women of Worth decided to give their support to WorldCrafts as a ministry that can help women out of poverty. We are deeply grateful for the invitation that WOW sent to their members.
You can learn more about Women of Worth at http://www.wowintl.net/. You can learn more about WorldCrafts at http://worldcrafts.org.
