The idea of churches sharing buildings seems surprising and outlandish to most people today, but it has a long history going back to the Reformation. In sixteenth-century Germany it was called Simultaneum. The oldest and largest of these is St. Peter’s Cathedral, Bautzen, Germany, which from 1523 to the present day has been shared by a Roman Catholic and Lutheran congregation. As many congregations struggle to afford the historic church buildings they have inherited, and it becomes increasingly common for historic buildings to be sold off to commercial developers to be demolished or transformed into trendy apartments, recalling this centuries-old practice of churches sharing buildings may offer an alternative.
We need not look so far away as sixteenth-century Europe to find plenty of similar examples. In nineteenth-century America, it was not at all uncommon for congregations to lack the funds to build. Lutheran and Reformed German immigrants to Pennsylvania frequently cooperated to build church buildings with the express purpose of sharing them between two congregations with different confessional commitments.
Cartersville, GA, provides a couple of interesting examples. A Western frontier settlement in the mid-nineteenth century, the first Bishop of Georgia, The Rt Revd Stephen Elliott – who was also the Rector of St. John’s in Savannah