By Stephen Kneale
Yesterday, a strange incident happened in Manchester.
You can read about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/22/witness-appeal-bus-collision-bridgewater-canal-aqueduct-eccles-greater-manchester
A bus driver managed to drive his bus – carrying a significant number of passengers – off its main route into a low-level aqueduct.
The roof rips off the entire upper deck of the bus. Three people were seriously injured, with one person being ejected from the upper deck of the bus altogether. You can watch the video of what happened by following the link.
Now, bus crashes happen. In a sense, there is nothing unusual about that. What is less normal is for buses to suddenly take an altogether different route. What is even less normal than that is – despite several warning signs about height restrictions and even hanging chains (chains that sit at the height of the bridge and hit the bus showing you it is too high to go under) – the driver ploughed on through the bridge regardless. I can see why the police are now involved and why they are wondering if this driver warrants charging with dangerous driving.
I don’t have a great deal to say about the specific incident itself. I’m sure more details will come out in time. But I am minded to see something of a warning for us in it. Here was a man who despite all the signs, despite a number of measures designed to make him stop and change course, seemed to continue regardless leading to seriously damaging consequences. The lesson here is to heed the signs!
I was speaking with somebody about this the other day. It is a sad fact of church life that not everyone will get on with whatever you are doing. It is inevitable that people will sometimes leave churches (before you ask, no, nobody has left our church and this is not about anyone in particular!) But there must come a point where so many people leave, all at once, and seem to cite the same issue that must at least cause you to ask the question about whether you might be the source of the problem.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you ARE the source of the problem necessarily. Nor does it mean the issue is with the church and not those leaving necessarily. But when almost your entire church has left, in one go, and cites the same reason, some time before you wind up and close the doors, you may want to ask the question: might we do something a little differently here?
It may not be people leaving exactly. It may just be the situation you are in. Something you are doing (or not doing) and you plough on regardless. But at some point, before you pull stumps, you might need to see the warnings and do something before you effectively plough your bus straight into that low lying bridge. Crashes aren’t inevitable. Even if things are not going in the direction one might hope, it is possible to change direction, slow down, and do things in such a way that – even if things do end – it doesn’t do so abruptly in a heap of twisted wire and metal. Usually, before your bus hits that bridge, there have been warning signs that would have allowed you to change course or minimally come to a more orderly stop.
And so, we must heed the warnings. We must read the signs. We must see them and change direction or stop of our own volition much earlier, lest we too find ourselves crashing our into our own metaphorical low-lying aqueducts.