The sad demise of the church pew

Imagine a child’s drawing of the interior of a traditional English church and the elements the picture is likely to contain. There will be colourful stained-glass windows, an altar and, almost certainly, rows of sturdy wooden pews. Yet the sad truth is that in parish after parish, the pews – which are often centuries old – are being removed and replaced by grimly functional chairs, of the sort to be found in any meeting hall or conference centre. I recently went to my own mid-Victorian parish church after a couple of months away and was dismayed to find the familiar old pews all gone and in their stead identikit rows of seats with pink cushions.

Why do the Church of England’s seating arrangements matter? Isn’t the getting of bums on to ecclesiastical seats the only thing that counts in our aggressively secular era of declining congregations? My answer would be a frustratingly ambivalent ‘yes but no’ – the two issues are linked. Pews, like it or not, are at the heart of what a church represents to many people, regular congregants or otherwise, and without them something substantially different is on offer.

The arguments for de-pewing are understandable. Without these heavy fixed pieces of furniture, which are only in use a handful of times a week, church buildings can become multipurpose spaces, open all hours and available to a range of people and activities. These areas can be decorated and uplit to become a ‘community hub’, which in my experience tends to mean a cross between a nursery and a Starbucks. Children can run about and coffee can be sold. God, if he manages to get a look-in at all, will be present in the form of some irksome, tinny religious muzak.

This admittedly gets people into churches, although whether it encourages them to attend an actual service is another matter. It is also important to note that old pews cannot be removed without due formal rigour. An application for a faculty, supported by the parochial church council, is submitted to the diocese and appropriate bodies, such as the Victorian Society, may also be consulted.

But here’s the rub: a service without pews has a different timbre. Whether intentional or not, a service becomes less formal. Have you ever seen people kneel to pray in a church full of Ikea-type seats? The glory of pews is the feeling they afford of being alone in company: you can contemplate the complexities of life and faith in your own little bubble of solitude, before turning to your neighbour further along the row with a friendly smile. At my church, everyone used to gravitate each week to their customary spot in their preferred pew, enjoying precious personal space as well as the companionship of those around them. Newcomers were welcomed and settled easily and happily into this pattern. Mobile phones and other distractions remained out of sight. Peace and stillness, such rare commodities in modern life, reigned supreme.

With chairs, there is nothing of this gloriously complex dynamic at play. Instead, all is bland, all is easy, all is smoothed over. Contemplation is replaced by chit-chat and occasional visitors, hankering after church the way they remember it, are startled. It’s sad to say, but the content of the services is too often tinged by this wash of blandness. Stark religious difficulties are eschewed in favour of platitudes. If the church is going to survive, so the thinking seems to run, it is going to need to attract a newer generation, raised on the sometimes trite tenets of self-help and self-expression. Mulling at length upon the tough stuff and getting sore knees in the process, while harking back to a golden age of vicars and parishioners as portrayed in the novels of Barbara Pym, is not going to achieve this goal.

Yet if the Church of England is famous for one thing, it is awkward compromise (look at the never-ending contortions over same-sex partnerships). The solution here seems simple enough: leave the first few rows of pews nearest the altar untouched and swap the rest for chairs if necessary. That way, caffeine can be consumed and community events hosted, in a space that nonetheless offers a quiet but firm reminder of its original purpose.