The First Parish Church in Dorchester, was built in 1631 by the emigrants from Dorchester, Dorset and the south west of England who founded the town of Dorchester, Massachusetts on March 30, 1630.
The first church building was an crude log cabin thatched with grass. As well as the church, the Puritans founded the first elementary school supported by public money in the New World. They held the first town meeting at the church, which determined policy through open and frequent discussion. In all of this they were inspired by the ideal of the Kingdom of God on earth and the attempt to realize this in England in the time of the Rev. John White. The church is referred to as a 'Foundation Stone of the Nation".
The First Parish Church of Dorchester is now a Unitarian Universalist church.
Famous quotes containing the words parish and/or church:
“My stardust melody, the memory of love’s refrain.”
—Mitchell Parish (1901–1993)
“Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of sacralizing person and community.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)