BANGOR, Maine — A century ago, mainline Protestant churches wouldn’t have considered sharing their houses of worship with a denomination whose beliefs and worship styles were different from their own.
But as membership in those congregations has declined steadily in the 21st century and new congregations have taken root in communities, sharing worship space is a solution that is helping older congregations survive and younger, growing congregations thrive.
Imago Dei Anglican Church had been on a nomadic journey since its founding in 2010. The congregation worshipped in five locations, moving every few years because it outgrew rented space.
First Baptist Church was founded in Bangor in 1818. Today, it sits on Center Street above City Hall at the top of Park Street Hill. It is a large, stately building with stained glass windows, a pipe organ, Sunday school rooms, a kitchen and a devoted but dwindling congregation.
For the past two years, between 100 and 120 adults have attend Imago Dei services each Sunday, and between 40 and 50 worshippers have gathered at First Baptist.
Last month, the two congregations began sharing the church at 56 Center St. So far, it has been a win-win for both congregations, even though their worship styles and liturgical practices are very different.
“It feels really great,” the Rev. Justin Howard, rector of Imago Dei, said after Sunday’s service. “We have plenty of space for kids. It’s clean, it’s bright, it’s warm.
“And, it is used primarily as a church, so there aren’t a lot of other kinds of groups coming in and out, which is a big relief for us because we don’t have to set up and tear down every single Sunday,” Howard said. “It was very taxing on our volunteers to do that every week. We calculated that collectively we save about 1,800 volunteer hours a year by moving here.”
The congregation’s new home also has room for the 45 or so Imago Dei children under the age of 12 to attend catechism classes.
Two years ago, as Imago Dei was moving from the Keith Anderson Community Center in Orono to the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor, First Baptist made the difficult decision to go from a full-time to a part-time pastor. The congregation also made a commitment to doing all it could to remain in its historic building completed in 1913 after its first church was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1911.
“We’re tying to hang onto this building,” Steven Douglas, the treasurer at First Baptist, said. “It’s a lovely building, but it’s not free to keep it going. It’s expensive to heat, it’s expensive to maintain, and it’s expensive to run lights. It was becoming a financial drain, so we needed some help in that sense.”
The cost of maintaining the building is $40,000 per year, Douglas said. The sharing agreement calls for Imago Dei to pay half of that cost in monthly increments.
“One of the things that helped in deciding to go forward was that we really felt Imago Dei was more interested in helping us be stewards of this building,” he said. “They did not just want to be renters that were here on Sunday morning. They wanted a place that they could call home and could share with us.”
More than a year ago, First Baptist explored a sharing arrangement with a different church but their talks did not come to fruition, he said.
Because Henderson Memorial Baptist Church in Farmington has a sharing agreement with Summit Faith Community, a Christian Reformed Church, First Baptist would not be charting new territory in Maine for its denomination.
Congregations sharing space is not new to Bangor either. In the early 1980s and into the mid-1990s, Congregation Beth El, the city’s Reform synagogue, shared space with the Unitarian Church, now the Union Street Brick Church. In 1995, Beth El purchased its French Street building from Messiah Baptist Church. The building was occupied by the First Church of Christ Science from 1922 until 1990, when it was sold to Messiah Baptist.
National statistics on the number of congregations sharing space don’t appear to be gathered by one group or organization. But diverse groups that worship in the same space are getting some attention from the media.
Earlier this year, The Washington Post reported on a Long Island church, founded in 1732 that is home to a Protestant congregation, a synagogue, a Muslim study group and a collective for interfaith families. Minnesota Public Radio reported on the Cross of Glory Lutheran Church, located in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area that shares its worship space with two congregations with roots in Liberia and a Pentecostal church whose worshippers pray in Spanish.
Advice on sharing worship space and avoiding conflict is readily available on the internet. The Rev. Ralph F. Wilson, of Joyful Heart Renewal Ministry, suggests on his blog that churches sharing space have the following:
— A written document listing the theological reasons for sharing buildings.
— A written covenant or agreement between congregations spelling out policies, room use and schedule.
— Regularly scheduled meetings between the pastors of the two groups, at least monthly.
— Regularly scheduled meetings between lay leaders in an inter-congregational relations committee, at least quarterly.
— Representation on each other’s church boards and committees.
— Several cooperative activities in ministry, worship and work.
So far, First Baptist and Imago Dei are following at least half of the suggestions. They have a written agreement, a committee of lay leaders from both churches meets monthly, and they will have a joint service on Christmas Eve.
To date, differences in theology and liturgy have not been topics of discussion.
“Both the churches decided we’d be very respectful of each other’s traditions, but we didn’t spend very much time at all discussing theological differences because it’s a shared space thing,” Howard said. “We’d be doing our thing, they’d be doing their thing, and it would be all good.”
The biggest change for both congregations has been changes in service times. Imago Dei worships at 8:30 a.m. Sundays, and the Baptist service begins at 11 a.m. Both congregations previously held services at 10 a.m.
“We share a lot of common beliefs such as the Trinity and Christ being the son of God, who died for our sins and will come again,” the Rev. David Henry, interim pastor at First Baptist, said. “The biggest difference is that the central part of their service is Communion, and for us, it is the sermon.”
Services at Imago Dei combine many of the traditional elements of the Anglican church, such as the reciting of the Nicene Creed, the passing of the peace in which congregants greet each other, making the sign of the cross and receiving Communion every Sunday. The congregants enjoy worship music with words projected onto a screen, there is a time of one-on-one healing prayer, and there is a casual but intimate feel to services.
The Baptist service is more traditional. It begins with greetings and announcements, includes a time of silent and pastoral prayer, an offertory, sermon and benediction. The Baptist hymnal and the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible sit in racks on the backs of the pews.
Despite their different styles of worship, both congregations have the same ultimate goal — to reach as many people as possible with the transforming love of Jesus.