Madison, Wisconsin – When she was a child, the Reverend Lynne Smith told her mother that she wanted to be a nun. "That's ridiculous," her mother said. "You're not Catholic."

Her mother hadn't counted on the Sisters of Saint Benedict.

The Catholic sisters, rarely slaves to convention, are inviting Protestant and Orthodox women to join them in creating the first ecumenical monastery in the United States.

Ms. Smith, a Presbyterian pastor, is the first to take the leap.

"Up until now, many Protestant women who felt a call to contemplative life had nowhere to go," said Ms. Smith, 46, a native of El Paso, Texas. "Essentially, our tradition lost the monastic expression of Christian life with the Reformation."

The ecumenical community is called the Benedictine Women of Madison. Ms. Smith made her historic first profession to monastic life in June. She now lives, works and prays with her Catholic sisters, but remains a Presbyterian.

"The sisters joke that I can't become Catholic because then the monastery wouldn't be ecumenical," she said. "Seriously, I didn't come to the monastery to become a Catholic, but to deepen my walk with God."

Nationally, the number of sisters has dropped from 181,000 to 81,000 over the past 35 years. Faced with dramatic losses, Catholic religious orders are trying new means to reverse the trend.

In Erie, Pennsylvania, Benedictine sisters are inviting Catholic women to join as temporary members for one to three years. But the Sisters of Saint Benedict balk at the idea that their new venture is a ploy to generate numbers, even though membership has dropped from a high of 40 to two active members.

"This monastery doesn't have to continue," said Sister Joanne Kollasch, 69, the director of spiritual formation. "We could hook up with another monastery. But that's not where we feel God leading."

Long steeped in ecumenical outreach, the sisters see opening the doors to non-Catholics as the logical next step.

"It doesn't make sense to us anymore to exclude Protestant and Orthodox women from being in community with us," Sister Kollasch said. "We're not trying to set up a model. We're not trying to be an example. We're doing what seems right for us."

The monastery is nestled on 130 acres of wooded hills overlooking Lake Mendota, just outside of Madison. Once isolated farmland, the sister's land now borders an upscale golf course and housing complex.

A few years ago, the developer tried to buy out the sisters for several million dollars. They rebuffed him, then stepped up their environmentalism — dredging a lake and restoring wetlands and prairie on the property.

"He wanted to tee off from the top of the hill," said Sister Mary David Walgenbach, 61, the prioress. "We said, 'No that's God's spot.'"

The hill is where the sisters founded a girls' college prep school in 1953. By 1966, long before the ecumenical movement became fashionable, the sisters turned the school into an ecumenical center.

Ever since, Saint Benedict Center has been a hub for retreats and conferences for people of all faiths. In the 1960s, monks from Taizé, an ecumenical community in France, came. In the 1970s, the first negotiations for the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America took place there.

Even the Dalai Lama paid a visit, long before he commanded rock-star crowds. "He was a very soft-spoken, common, easy-to-meet-with gentle person," said Sister Walgenbach, who could have just as easily been describing herself.

Back then, the sisters paid a price for their outreach. Catholics often questioned their commitment to the church.

"Many of the Catholic clergy thought what we were doing was extremely suspect," said Sister Kollasch. "They asked how could we run a retreat house that Protestants came to. That was 1966. Catholics and Protestants weren't talking much then."

Today, ecumenical discussions, agreements and joint ventures in ministry are taken for granted. Even so, the sisters still encounter criticism from some Catholics for inviting non-Catholics to become monastics.

"People say, 'Let the Protestants do that on their own if they want it,'" Sister Walgenbach said. "Or they say, 'You must be getting close to leaving the Catholic Church.'"

"We are pioneers," Sister Kollasch said. "Mary David and I could sit in our rockers and rock all day, but the Spirit compels us to push forward. That's the role of monastics. It's always to be a somewhat prophetic nucleus in the church."

The sisters are spreading the word about their ecumenical monastery on the Internet (www.sbcenter.org). They're advertising in Protestant journals. And they're inviting women between ages 25 and 50 to special retreats to explore monastic living.

Last year, two-thirds of the 71 inquiries came from Protestants.

"The Web has taken a lot of fear out of making that first contact," said Marykay Bell, an Episcopalian who works for the sisters. "People can anonymously get a great deal of information off the Web so that when they finally contact us, they've done some serious reflecting."

Ms. Smith was pastor of United Presbyterian Church in the little town of Columbus Junction, Iowa, when she saw an advertisement about the sisters in a religious journal. She wrote for information. She called the monastery. Then, over the next two years, she went to Madison for several retreats.

"I had pages and pages of questions," she said. "What would it mean to live in community? What kind of work would I do? Could I still be a pastor? What would happen to me financially? What happens in retirement?"

Sister Walgenbach said many non-Catholics who explore monastic life want to make sure they're not going to be co-opted into becoming Catholics.

"That's a legitimate fear," she said. "I tell them we have a wonderful ecumenical board helping us to put our vision into practice. Because I bring my Roman Catholic view, I can't possibly bring the Protestant. I need their eyes to help us do that."

Ms. Smith's interest in community living began in the 1980s, while she worked as a pastor in Kansas. She attended several retreats at a center run by Catholic sisters, who also offered her spiritual direction.

"It changed my perception of God," she said. "It changed the way I prayed. It changed the way I pursued my spiritual life. I ate dinners with them and prayed with them. I longed for a way to live with them, but I didn't want to leave my spiritual tradition."

Madison was an answer to prayer.

But her decision stunned her congregation and many of her clergy colleagues. Some thought she was going off to be a "nun," a term the sisters don't use because of negative stereo-types.

"A lot of people thought it was weird at first because, let's face it. Presbyterians just don't go off and join monasteries," said Louise Brokaw, an executive in the East Iowa Presbytery where Ms. Smith was a pastor. "But we understand more now. Now we see Lynne as an ecumenical pioneer. We hope to tap her to teach us about more about spirituality."

Ms. Smith's unusual faith journey indirectly has found credence in Presbyterian circles by popular writer Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota: a Spiritual Biography, The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith.

Ms. Norris' books have soared on the New York Times bestsellers list. In them she details how as a Presbyterian living in Lemmon, South Dakota., she deepened her Christianity through encounters with Benedictine monks.

It's a story that resonates with Protestants, especially the scores that have been flocking to Catholic centers for retreats and spiritual guidance since the 1990s. And it's a story that's raised the profile of Benedictines.

"It's a bold experiment. I'm proud of them," Ms. Norris has written about the Madison sisters. "Throughout their history, Benedictine women have always been the radicals."

The sisters' way of life is shaped by the Rule of St. Benedict. The practical guide, written by a sixth-century Italian monk, calls for simple living, with work and study revolving around prayer and hospitality.

Rather than leave their community to work, the sisters open their doors to the world. Visitors freely join them three times a day for the Liturgy of the Hours, prayers based on Scriptures and psalms. And on Sundays, dozens of people routinely come for Mass. The sisters, ardent feminists, insist on inclusive language in the prayers and hymns.

On a Sunday in July, the chapel was packed with casually dressed guests, including the sisters, who wore khaki skirts and blouses, having shed their habits and veils years ago. A mother and her 10-year-old daughter played violins. Afterward, the crowd spilled out onto the grounds for a picnic with Episcopalians from a nearby church. Sister Walgenbach joined the children in a water balloon fight.

"We have just as many problems with the Roman Catholics as they have with Episcopalians," said the Reverend Maurine Lewis, rector at St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church in Madison. "But the sisters help us to appreciate what we agree on. That's ecumenism in spades as far as I'm concerned."

The Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Madison has adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the ecumenical monastery. But in an unprecedented move, the federation of 18 autonomous Benedictine communities to which the sisters belong has pledged its support.

The sisters also sought the advice of the Reverend Dan Ward, a specialist in canon (church) law, in hopes of pre-empting any theologians who might challenge their monastic vision. Father Ward, a monk from St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, said the new community is in keeping with the traditions of early Christian monastics.

"Early monastics weren't caught up in ecclesiastical structures," he said. "They would go out and live in the desert and follow the call of God. The sisters are ahead of their time. Down the road, people won't think twice about what they're doing."

Ms. Smith spent the summer pursuing monastic studies at St. John's University in Collegeville. A few days ago, she moved back to Madison to begin her new life. She's sharing a house on the grounds with Sister Kollasch. (Benedictine sisters from overseas share another house with Sister Walgenbach. Visitors coming for retreats either stay in either the retreat center or in the monastery, where the sisters have offices.)

Eventually, Ms. Smith may work as a pastor again. But her primary obligation is to her new community. The sisters employ about 30 people, oversee dozens of volunteers, conduct outreach to monastic women in several countries and lead several programs for guests.

"More recently, I've started leading retreats," Ms. Smith said. "But before I made my profession, the formation director decided my work. I did lots of stuff in the garden — picking apples, weeding. I helped cook on the weekends. But it's not like I was a slave. Everybody worked."

She hasn't decided whether she wants to be called "sister." She definitely doesn't want to be called "pastor," however, because she isn't in charge of a parish.

An Episcopal woman is in the early stages of formation and could become the community's next member, Sister Kollasch said. The ideal candidate for monastic life has a strong faith, a desire to pray, gets along well with others and respects people of differing traditions, she added.

Oh, and she must find what she's doing life-giving.

"Oprah Winfrey says that and everybody gets excited," Sister Kollasch said. "I think she's on the mark."

"Are you happy? Do you feel what you're doing is God's call? Life's too short to be doing something that doesn't make you happy. So that's a question for us."