Cooperative Parish Council Meeting
Date: Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Time: 7 pm
Location: Memorial United Methodist Church
Our church will host the Farmington River Cooperative Parish Council Meeting on December 11th at 7 pm.
What is a Cooperative Parish?
Cooperative Parishes: One Body, One Spirit, One Hope
Paragraph 206 of the 2016 Book of Discipline begins this way: “Local churches, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, may enhance their witness to one another and to the world by showing forth the love of Jesus Christ through forms of mutual cooperation.” A cooperative ministry is when groups of people representing two or more churches share their ministries to meet the needs of the community. Example of this are local churches completing a mission project together or working together in a community feeding ministry. A cooperative parish is an ongoing structured way to employ cooperative ministries between churches within a defined region. The cooperative parish will have a Parish Council with clergy and laity from each church in the cooperative parish to discuss, plan and make decisions regarding mission and ministry through the cooperative parish.
The Cooperative Parish provides the opportunity for all churches to engage in ministry together that they cannot do as individual churches. These mission and ministry opportunities are possible in a cooperative parish. Cooperative Parishes also offer the laity access to different and new ministry opportunities, experience the gifts and leadership of other clergy and laity across the parish, and use their gifts and calling in new contexts and settings across the parish. Through Cooperative Parishes, the laity are empowered and equipped to live into their unique ministries.
Cooperative Parishes are a Wesleyan model of our connection to expand our church’s ministry to the communities, using our churches and our parish ministries as the center of transformative possibility to all the people in the parish and beyond.
