Over the past six years, Village Church Rolesville has grown and become a unique and vibrant community of faith. Wake Forest UMC has also experienced great change as a church. The relationship between Village Church Rolesville and Wake Forest UMC evolved naturally. However, our structure and language has not kept up with, nor adequately reflected, this natural evolution of relationship. While there has been and continues to be great fruitfulness in our shared ministry, the current organizational structure does not seem to be the best model for our shared future together. Thus, with consensus from both VCR Lead Team and WFUMC Admin Council, we adopted a new model and structure to equip and empower our churches and leadership for more effective mission and ministry. This change in relationship and structure allows for continued partnership in key areas of mission ministry and administrative support while allowing for individual contextualization of ministry and leadership within Wake Forest UMC and Village Church Rolesville. We pray it helps us effectively live into our mission as United Methodists to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

We are using the language of “Cooperative Parish” or “Multi-Church” to describe our relationship as two distinctive United Methodist Churches in a strategic partnership outlined in a shared covenant together.

A Cooperative Parish has been an expression of our connectional nature as United Methodists for a long time. In our opinion, it’s been a highly underutilized option for local churches. Without a doubt, it is becoming and will become even more prevalent moving forward as churches recognize the benefits of partnering together in a rapidly changing social and cultural landscape. There are several other examples within our North Carolina Annual Conference of churches moving from multisite campuses to Cooperative Parish or multi-church expressions.

Pastors Jim and Tyler with the blessing of the leadership teams at VCR and WFUMC formed a Covenant Team to assess current areas of partnership and discern what areas of strategic areas of cooperation would allow for strong mission and ministry moving forward as a Cooperative Parish. The team talked, received feedback, and ultimately came up with the covenant document which was approved by WFUMC Admin Council and VCR Lead Team.

Each year in June, leadership from Village Church Rolesville and Wake Forest UMC will come together to review the covenant, or as needed, and make modifications. The covenant is designed to be a living document.

Technically, that’s not really true of any United Methodist Church. Every United Methodist Church is connected to every other one because of our structure. However, Village Church Rolesville will exist as its own congregation and not as a campus of Wake Forest UMC. For example, VCR and WFUMC will have completely separate finances and budgets. You can view the covenant to see the specific areas of cooperation. Anything not referenced in the covenant will be separate and distinct.

Having a proportional share of financial resources (costs) means that the total costs are divided among each church based on a specific proportion or ratio. This approach ensures that each party pays an amount corresponding to their share or usage of the total cost. The proportion can be determined by various factors such as the number of people, the amount of usage, or the size of an entity's involvement.

Only their proportional share in multisite staff members.

VCR does not have a building at this time. WFUMC has an unoccupied office. Therefore, the office meets a need for Pastor Tyler and VCR as he needs an office for ministry. In addition, this office arrangement allows Pastor Jim and Pastor Tyler an ideal format to share ideas about sermon series, small group studies and best practices.