The Smallest Church

You could drive past it, and many people do. Beside the Niagara River Parkway, next to a country market, stands a white chapel so small that the sunlight comes through its bell arch like it was aimed. The sign gives it its name — The Living Water Wayside Chapel — and gives you permission in the same breath: Welcome. So we stopped. That is what it is for: a church built for people who are on their way somewhere else.

Inside, everything is the size of the intention. Four short pews. Two Bibles. A rack of free literature from Back to God Ministries, the shelf waiting to be refilled. A guest book. The chapel was built in 1964 by Christian Reformed churches in the area, about ten feet square, and it holds — generously — six people. It is often called one of the smallest churches in the world, and it may be. But standing in it, what you feel is not how small it is. It is how complete it is. Nothing a church needs is missing.

The falls get the crowds, and rightly — we stood in their mist an hour before this. But it was the little white room by the road that slowed our hearts down. Faith does not always need a tower. Sometimes it needs six seats, an open door, and a patch of quiet beside a busy parkway, kept ready for whoever is passing. We signed the guest book, said our thanks — for the road, for the river, for small things made carefully — and drove on lighter than we arrived.