Welcome to the website for Manakin Episcopal Church. Founded in 1700, the church is a member of the Diocese of Southern Virginia.

We are a suburban church conveniently located in a rural setting of Powhatan County just 1 mile west of Route 288. The congregation is a blend of members from a wide geographic area that includes Powhatan, Chesterfield, and Henrico counties.

Our cornerstone beliefs include a committment to the parish family, Christian education, and community service through outreach.

Thank you for taking a moment to visit our web site.  If you are searching for a church home and would like more information about Manakin, please contact us so we can learn more about you.  We look forward to your visit.

"Rock Solid in Uncertain Times"

Dear Friends,

The leaves are finally falling, and, since they were so late turning this year, they're all coming down at once! In neighborhoods like ours with tons of trees, one can clear a driveway or rake a section of the yard one day and have it completely buried again the next. One must struggle to see the "big picture," that all the leaves must eventually be raked or blown and hauled away or one will be tempted to give in to a sense of futility - "didn't I just do this yesterday ?!?"

I suspect that in many aspects of our lives we experience that same sense of redundancy. We do the same things over and over - on a daily basis or more infrequently. As the seasons of the Church roll around, we find ourselves planning to do once again the things that we did last year - or for many years before. Sometimes, a new element enters in - some new idea to help deepen our experience of years past. Last year, we celebrated Founders' Day in a new way, using the order of worship from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer Book, which many people found very meaningful. Such “innovations” sometimes enhance our life together; sometimes they feel somewhat intrusive into the time-honored way we have done things.  Certainly there is much to be said for continuing to do things in ways that have been meaningful to a community for a long time. There is something deeply comforting about knowing that as the Church’s new year begins with the First Sunday of Advent, we will have the opportunity to make advent wreaths for our homes and will see the purple of the anticipation of the arrival of the King at his altar. And, of course, Advent is meant to heighten our anticipation of the Incarnation, when we will do many of the same things we have done for years to honor his birth. Doing the same things does not mean that we are in a rut, that there is a monotony about our traditions. Most of them persist because there is a depth to their meaning, often layered over by ages of repetition. And, particularly with things that only come around once a year, there is not too much of a sense of them being too “routine.”

Sometimes, though, in the rhythms of our life – daily or seasonally or annually – something new or different does break in. Sometimes it something little or simple – sometimes it represents a big change. As we look back on a Parish history that will soon begin its 309th year of ministry, we know there must have been many moments of change. Leaders, clergy and lay, came and went. Generations that carved a place out of the wilderness went on to the eternal banquet, leaving behind new generations to craft new visions and new realities for the evolving congregation. Periods of great activity alternated with times of near dormancy – bigger churches were built to accommodate teeming numbers, only to be “downsized” in the next phase of life. As I think of the myriad changes that three centuries of ministry represent, I am struck by a piece written by Bishop Edmond Lee Browning in his daily meditations book, A Year of Days with the Book of Common Prayer:

When I visit an old church, I often think about what life was like for the people who first built it. How much hard work it took to build the church. What a different country they lived in from the one in which we live:  a country in which uninhabited areas went on for miles and miles, a country in which people lived lives hard, lonely, and short. A country in which a man in his fifties was old and so was a woman in her forties. A country in which, at this time of year, everyone who could carry a hayfork was in the fields bringing in the harvest. We drive by the roadside vegetable stands and see the pumpkins, the squashes, the last tomatoes and beans. We buy some of these things and decorate our homes with them, hang ears of corn on our doors, buy a couple of bales of straw and arrange them on our front porches with a pot or two of chrysanthemums. We think they are beautiful. They looked at those things and thanked God they wouldn’t starve in the winter to come.

And yet, they found time and energy and wood and trust enough to build God’s house. Something in them knew that their trust rightly resided in God. In a time when life was harder and more precarious than our lives are, they found the courage to trust God.

I don’t know that Bishop Browning ever had an opportunity to visit Manakin, but he certainly could have been writing about our beloved Parish. From those first struggling Huguenots through our whole long, rich history, our forbearers faced all sorts of hardships and difficulties, and yet they kept finding those resources of which the Bishop writes to continue and to grow in their ministries. They found the trust and the resources to carry on through good times and bad, and to build and rebuild, expanding (and occasionally shrinking) as they went. Always, though, they kept and built on the best of their traditions and customs, adding to them in appropriate ways and thereby creating new ones.

As we pile up the leaves once again, instead of merely being a great task of drudgery, perhaps they might become a metaphor for those things that are coming that we repeat each year with joy – the autumnal signs of the impending new year at Advent and the renewed excitement of the birth of the Christ Child once again. Or maybe they’ll just be those darned leaves…again!  Either way, let us not fail to pause for a moment and offer thanks for those who struggled before us to leave us this wonderful heritage.

Happy Founders’ Day, and have a blessed Advent.

In Christ’s Love,
Michael+