Calico or satin?

Lisa Swett had to make a decision.

When she told her mother, Peggy Swett, she would accompany her to a meeting of United Methodist Women, the 16-year-old hadn’t realized it was the same weekend as her junior prom.

Reluctantly, Lisa Swett went to Boston and marched through the streets wearing a calico dress to commemorate the group’s founding when she could have been home draped in satin, dancing to the local band’s rendition of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

Twenty years after Lisa Swett, 36, of Orrington made that fateful decision, she was elected president of the Northeast Jurisdictional Quadrennial Meeting of United Methodist Women. Translation: It’s a group comprising nearly half a million women in thousands of Methodist churches.

There was a reason she saved that calico dress for two decades, the kindergarten teacher said recently.

“The women who first met in Boston in 1869 to form the organization decided that instead of wearing new clothing, they would wear simple calico dresses and put the difference in the cost toward missionaries,” she said of her trip to Boston in 1984.

“There were more than 1,000 women at that meeting, and we left this huge ballroom at the hotel to march through streets of Boston to the Tremont Methodist Episcopal Church like they did 115 years before.”

The nurse-turned-teacher has attended the First United Methodist Church on Essex Street in Bangor all her life. Her father, Dave Swett, was the organist and helped organized the ecumenical vacation Bible school held on the church’s broad lawn.

Lisa Swett is the third generation of women in her family to be active in the Methodist women’s group. Her mother served as a director in the 1980s, and her grandmother Helen Swett worked on the staff of the organization in Portland and Dayton, Ohio.

Elected to a four-year term, Lisa Swett has spent the past four years preparing to serve as president of the organization, which comprises New England and the mid-Atlantic states in its jurisdiction. She worked on the planning committee for the meeting in Baltimore last month, attended by 1,500 women, where she officially took the reins of the group.

“I never would have said yes to being president if I hadn’t spent the last four years being involved on this level,” Swett said. “When they first asked me, they told me I couldn’t tell anyone, but I had to tell my mom. She said, ‘You can’t say no. It’s a wonderful opportunity.’ It’s nice to know I have that support.”

That support is nearby. Swett shares the home where she grew up with her parents. The second floor has been remodeled into a separate residence for her.

Peggy Swett, who teaches first and second grades in Orrington, said this week that the role of women in the United Methodist Church has changed dramatically since she was so actively involved. Peggy Swett believes that all over the world, families are in crisis and that the church can do much to meet their needs.

And, she’s proud of her daughter.

“She’ll bring a lot of new ideas to the group as a younger person,” said Peggy Swett. “She has a neat perspective and personal history to bring to the job. It’s a lot for her to do. I think she’ll find herself very busy, but extremely satisfied.”

Lisa Swett said that one of her goals is to revive the youth mission schools she attended as a teenager.

“These schools were held in the summer, and [United Methodist] women would teach them from a world perspective on a particular topic,” she said. “A big part of it is just the learning about people. The church wanted you to look at the world and see how you fit into the world. I grew up learning that church was not only learning about yourself and your own little faith journey. It was seeing the world beyond.”

Indeed, Lisa Swett wants the young people of the United Methodist Church to know the world beyond their back yards.