Welcome
We are now well into 2024 and our Church Year has started well. We still have some problems, mostly related to our streaming, but we are working on it and in the meantime we are putting up a recording as soon as we can after the conclusion of our worship.
Here is a recording of our most recent Sunday Service (February 11th) conducted by Ken and Veronica and members of our congregation.
Our beautiful, rural church
Fogo Parish Church is a tiny, rural congregation meeting in the village after which we are named, as people have done for at least the last eight-hundred and fifty years. On a normal Sunday if you walk through our doors for Sunday worship at 10.30 a.m. you will find thirty to forty of us gathered there to welcome you.
Rev. Dr. Dane Sherrard, our non-stipendiary parish minister
Sometimes our services are conducted by our non-stipeniary minister, Rev. Dr. Dane Sherrard, who, although retired, has been our minister for eight years. Sometimes our services are conducted by members of the congregational worship team and sometimes we welcome ministers, priests or pastors from other congregations to lead our worship.
Bill and Peggy Ewart, our first visiting ministers, with some of our church leaders
Our congregation is made up of folk from a whole variety of church backgrounds. We are Church of Scotland and Scottish Episcopal, Roman Catholic and Anglican, Baptist and Evangelical, and some who are just learning. Our worship and our practices reflect the wide variety of our membership and new people regularly come to join our church family.
Our congregation in conference — making plans together
As a congregation we enjoy singing — our services are full of music. We also enjoy hearing the good news as it is read to us from the pages of scripture and we take seriously our responsibility as people who ‘have’ to share with others who ‘haven’t’, whether that be through contributing to the upkeep of a school in the Holy Land or supporting our missionary partner in Malawi as he works with broken families. Locally our building is always open as a ‘warm place’ when it is cold and we have a team of people who are always available to help.
Dr. Linus Malu, our missionary partner from Malawi
This website is designed to tell you something about our congregation. Please explore it by clicking the links at the top of the page. Sometimes it looks as though we are a bit out of date — but that is usually because we have changed the way we do things in an attempt to do them better! For example, instead of a Newsletter, our minister now sends out a Saturday Pewspaper each week. Newsletters are reserved for special events such as our annual report or to say thank you to everyone who helped with our ‘Hen House’ project. Intrigued! Visit our ‘Bits and Pieces’ page to find out more!
Worshipping together in the Holy Land
We like to think that the big news about Fogo Parish Church is that we meet together every Sunday to worship God and that together we try to make a difference for good in our community and in our world but things are changing in the Church in Scotland and inevitably, with so many closures projected by the Church of Scotland, our church is among the forty or so percent of church buildings in Scotland scheduled to close over the next few years. So for many the big news may possibly be that a Fogo Parish Church Community Trust has been set up and is now actively in discussions with the Church of Scotland over the transfer of ownership of the building to it, enabling the congregation to return to worshipping in a locally owned building as it will have done for many hundreds of years before it was transferred into the hands of the Church of Scotland a hundred years ago, and also enabling it always to continue to be available for the community it was built to serve in times gone by. The Fogo Parish Church Community Trust has its own website which can also be accessed here.