Staff

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Reverend John Parille is our Senior Pastor and oversees the Long Ridge United Methodist Church and the Bethel United Methodist Church. Pastor John comes to us with years of business, sales and marketing experience. This experience coupled with his depth of spirituality, passion for bringing Christ to the world and his love for people, offers a major contribution to our ministry team here at Long Ridge UMC.

Pastor John began his pastoral ministry by serving as an Associate Pastor at New Life UMC in New Fairfield CT in 2010. Since that time, Pastor John has served at the Gaylordsville UMC from 2013 until 2016. He has been the  Senior Pastor at the Bethel UMC since 2016 as well as the Long Ridge UMC since 2019. Pastor John is also the Parish Leader for the Western Frontier Parish groups which consists of 6 local Methodist churches.

In addition to handling the normal pastoral duties of preaching, teaching and visitation— Pastor John helps our church by putting a face to our church out in the community. He develops strategies to help fulfill the segment of our mission to make Jesus known beyond our four walls.

This includes reaching local families who are unchurched, developing evangelism teams, working closely with our leaders and members  to provide instruction on evangelism, follow-up of visitors and developing marketing strategies to make our ministry known in the Greater Danbury and Bethel area.

Pastor John is married to his wife Maria and they have four daughters as well as a grandson named Jack.

We are a Safe Sanctuary Church, which means we follow the resolutions set forth by the United Methodist Church. Our purpose for establishing this policy and accompanying procedures is to demonstrate our absolute and unwavering commitment to the physical safety and spiritual growth of all of our children and youth.

Therefore, as a Christian community of faith and a United Methodist congregation, we pledge to conduct the ministry of the gospel in ways that assure the safety and spiritual growth of our children and youth, and our staff. We follow reasonable safety measures in the selection and recruitment of workers by conducting a background check on volunteers who work with the children and by requiring church membership of at least 6 months before allowing an adult to lead a group. 

We have operational procedures in all programs and events, and have a clearly defined procedure (which conform to the requirements of state law) for reporting a suspected incident of abuse.  All volunteers must attend a Safe Sanctuary Training workshop.