ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column focused on so-called “union churches.”

I defined this phenomenon as “Two or more congregations of different religious denominations sharing ownership of a church building.”

It was often found in the more rural areas of the mid-Atlantic among the mainstream Lutheran and Reformed denominations of the German-speaking people. While these confessions were much different theologically, this mattered substantially less to most people in the pews.

I profiled last week the union church situation with which I’m most familiar, Bern Union Church, which existed from 1836 to 1996.

But in reading the seminal history of the early Lutheran and Reformed congregations, Charles H. Glatfelter’s Pastors and People, I realized that there were many iterations of union churches over the years.

Often these combinations were begun somewhat informally but later codified with a property deed or an incorporation document.

One iteration that crops up a few times in examining congregational histories is the discovery long after a union has begun that really the property only allowed for ownership by one denomination. This happened in Bernville, Berks County, when the old Northkill Union Church was broken apart and succeeded by Friedens Lutheran and St. Thomas Reformed.

Indeed, most of these union church arrangements were broken up in the second half of the 20^th century. In a lot of cases, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the parent body of most of the mid-Atlantic Lutherans, pushed congregations to secure their own facilities or (if unaffordable) merge into another Lutheran-only church.

In some cases, the ties that bound together a union church included the use of a sign register for baptisms or other sacramental acts.

This leads to occasional confusion that there was such a denomination as “Reformed Lutherans,” which was never (ever!) a thing.

When somebody tells me, for instance, “Well, I know they belonged to the Reformed Lutheran congregation”—what they’re really telling me is that they don’t know their church history very well.

Another iteration fairly common for unions that were forged in the 1800s was that if a new congregation joined an existing congregation, the original denomination retained full equity to the building and grounds and the new congregation was more like a tenant than a partner.

This may also have some impact on record keeping of the newer congregation, which might be more reliant on a less settled ministry and perhaps not have separate registers but rely only on its pastors and their private registers to record baptisms, marriages and burials.

Another thing that’s somewhat common is for congregations to rename themselves when a new church is built (I guess that’s great for marketing but from a genealogist’s standpoint … not so much!).

The upshot is that when looking for German-speaking ancestry in the mid-Atlantic, always consider that they closest congregation might have had a union partner!