EVERY Sunday, the supporters of the Llanymynech Wharf Visitor Centre gather to practise their faith. They run a canal memorabilia shop; manage exhibitions and guided tours; provide ice creams and cream teas; and they run canal trips, all day, on the narrowboat the George Washington Buck.
There is a catch, though. The navigable canal where they are based is 200 metres long. It hasn’t been connected to the 2000 miles of the canal network within the lifetime of any of the enthusiasts, who are all past retirement age. If you walk the five miles of the Offa’s Dyke path, which follows the Montgomery canal from the west into Llanymynech, this hive of activity looks absurd. Bridges have disappeared. Roads criss-cross the old canal. Gardens have been extended into it.
But if, instead, you walk the three miles to the visitor centre from the east, starting at Crickheath basin, the faith of the supporters looks a little different. Freedom is coming. Volunteers are rebuilding the ancient waterway that fell into disuse in the 1930s. Bridges arch over heavy polythene covers and bricks. Fresh signs, warning anglers not to fish close to non-existent power lines, stand by a hollow where sheep and lambs graze. The water is coming — but no one knows when.
And the faithfulness of the supporters begins to look heroic. The Montgomery canal may not connect into Llanymynech in their lifetimes, but the visitor centre will still be standing and doing its work when it does. One day, the canal will be restored to its original 30 miles length as far south as Welshpool.
THE visitor-centre supporters are my favourite picture of what it means to be a Church in the 21st century. Since I took to the canals in the spring, I have visited churches within walking distance of the canals — a peculiar sampling method, but every church is different. What characterises all of them is business as usual: practising faith, even when it might look absurd to continue to do so.
Every church was running a Messy Church programme. But family communion was conspicuous for the lack of children and families. I rarely saw any. Family is becoming a liturgical label, not a descriptor of the participants. A teatime service mid-afternoon in one church is attended by a small, elderly congregation in a newly restored building (it burned down in an arson attack a decade ago). The former sanctuary is now a café, which is also used for Warm Spaces during the week (though someone commented wryly that the building was so far outside the village that visitors were already warm by the time they walked there).
I scan an annual report in a church in Birmingham diocese. The congregation have been waiting all year to find out if they will still have a vicar. They are relieved to discover that they will — but their priest will now head an “oversight area”; so they will see much less of him or her.
In a different diocese, an old friend — a vicar — came aboard our boat to visit us for a meal. It turns out that we have moored in her parish. She explains that she has no churchwardens. No one volunteered at the annual meeting the previous week. How do you run a church without wardens? She finishes her glass of wine, jumps up, and says that she has to go to run Zoom compline and will send us a link. Fifteen minutes later, the internet signal is good enough for us to join her, with a few others, for the Office.
At another church in Shropshire, there is no sign of the Vicar. With six churches to run, Sunday services are the province of a benefice ministry team led by lay leaders, who run communion by extension at four of the churches at least once a month. But they also have a united Zoom service, and an outdoor service on other Sundays.
At still another church in Cheshire, they are launching a Saturday event for those who can’t cope with services. The publicity suggests that this will be dementia- friendly. There is so much life, so much that is fresh and original, so much willingness to experiment.
There are, of course, exceptions. The service where the retired priest enthuses that the baptism that he is conducting is a sign that God’s love is open to all, but checks with each communicant at the communion rail that they have actually been confirmed. A handful out of a congregation of 40 are brave enough to come forward.
IT IS Sunday morning. As our narrowboat crosses the Pontcysyllte aqueduct, there are throngs of dog-walkers and children walking bicycles across on one side, kayakers in the middle, and a void on the other. A vicar from a southern diocese is aboard, explaining his plans for planting a new congregation on a housing estate. He has been given a substantial grant towards this, but quotes the Bishop of Wellington: “The churches keep asking me for money, and I tell them if a ministry needs money to grow, I doubt the Lord is in it.”
Perhaps the most surprising experience of all my visits was the community service in an, as yet, unconsecrated church, due to be consecrated within a few days. The service was led by a curate who is in training alongside his day job. The congregation were urged to book their places to avoid being turned away on the great day, because the church was expected to be packed to the rafters.
TO MAINTAIN a national institution takes energy and resources. It also requires imagination, to see the possibilities where others don’t. But, at local level, the burdens of building and imagination can feel overwhelming. What the volunteers of the Wharf Visitor Centre illustrate is the priority of keeping the dream alive through the simple practice of getting into the boat every week and welcoming any who are willing to join you.
Around them, the ruined castles of the Welsh Marches point to the futility of trying to maintain territory using iron and stone. Before the first believers were called Christians, they were called “followers of the way”. Before repentance became spiritualised, it was about changing direction and taking the desert road back home — even if you are a minority of one.
Striving to maintain a national presence makes the institution look more like an unsuccessful corporation than a presence that promises much more, precisely because it is not of this solid world of brick and steel, but of flowing water.
The Llanymynech supporters inspire me because they belong to a particular place, but they are able to be followers of the way at one and the same time. That their particular patch is disconnected is problematic, but not the final word. There are ways of being church which are neither pragmatic nor hopeless.
Their calling, if I dare call it that, is to keep boating alive where they are. The future of the canal network, or of boating in general, is not their responsibility. And that frees them for what is immediately at hand.
John Griffiths is a Reader from St Albans diocese. He is somewhere on the canals.