Explorations and Responses the Past and Future of the Union Church (2000)

The two-volume work by Charles Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field 1717-1793, [1] is a wonderful and rich resource for Pennsylvania church life of the eighteenth century, when many of the union churches had their origin. At a time of great influx of German immigrants into undeveloped Pennsylvania, much of everything, personal and communal, started from scratch. In their attempts to establish religious communities in the new world, the settlers found few financial resources and few qualified pastors. Their appeals to the church leaders in Holland and to August Hermann Francke at Halle for financial assistance and pastoral leadership [2] went unanswered for some time, in part because of the difficulties in transmitting to Europe information in which European leaders would have confidence. The logic to their situation was the sharing of financial and leadership resources to provide for both congregational life and schools for youth, for in Pennsylvania there was no public-school system. At Tulpehocken from 1727 Reformed and Lutheran congregations used the same church for about eleven years. In Philadelphia from 1730 to 1743 Lutherans and Reformed rented a common building. Thus, in its beginnings, such sharing seemed to represent a temporary arrangement. However, at Old Goshenhoppen in Montgomery County the sharing of a building, begun in 1730, continued to the twentieth century. By 1748 there were twelve union churches involving about one-fifth of the congregations in existence. By 1776 there were seventy-eight union churches in which about forty-five percent of the congregations worshipped. Most of these seventy-eight churches survived into the twentieth century. One might say of these churches that their joining into union was a practical necessity and involved little vision that there were unique possibilities in this union. People from a similar culture speaking a common language came together, yet the entry into such union was also urged upon the Reformed and Lutherans by their desire to provide religious life and education in a new land, visions held individually but wedded in their union. There was a type of vision that informed many of the union churches, even though at times it was likely more explicit for the individual congregations of the union than the union itself. It is interesting to read the union-church agreements, some of which seem to imply a vision for the union. The agreement of St. Mary's Church, Silver Run, Carroll County, Maryland, dated 1762, stated: Since the present Reformed and Lutheran members, of the respective Protestant confessions, have seen the very pressing necessity of establishing God's worship among them in order to withstand the encroaching looseness, wickedness, blindness, and superstition, whereby parents and children may be instructed and built up in the sound doctrine of the Evangelical Reformed and Lutheran faith; and conformably to Christian order, that a suitable building or church is required: We the undersigned, the respective members, have resolved to enter upon such work in a spirit of love and for the salvation of our souls, and, to this purpose and end, have purchased adjacent land and have built the present church... II The Reformed and Evangelical Lutheran Congregations, founded on God's Word, shall respectively have and enjoy forever a like privilege, right, freedom and ownership of the above-mentioned land and church and whatever may be built thereon. III But as a congregation should honor another with which it is closely joined, sharing mutually the cares and burdens in the management of the land, church, and schoolhouse and together promoting everything possible and necessary thereto.... In order, therefore, that all these prescribed articles may be held inviolate, and that peace and unity may be promoted in this church to our children and our children's children, we bind ourselves herewith, for ourselves and our heirs, with and by one another, and truly one congregation to the other, that whoever or whatever pert endeavors to break these articles, shall pay the sum of [pound]100 Sterling. …