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The Devil's Best Invention

By Hedgehog.

I’ve been tucked away in my burrow for quite some while, but two comments made to me by friends have woken me from my long hibernation. The 1st comment was as follows: “The main reason I can’t develop alternative worship in my church is because it’s full of pews”.

Now is that a reason or an excuse? Hedgehog knows the speaker very well and is pretty sure it’s a reason, but I wonder if my friend is guilty of a lack of imagination.

Pews, as Hedgehog has commented before, were invented by the Devil, and it was one of his cleverest tactics. They have the effect of ensuring that the largest area of any church building can only be used for one purpose - formal acts of worship (yes, I realise that they can also be used for concerts, but, personally, I’d rather watch a concert on TV from the comfort of an armchair than perched uncomfortably on a pew). In parish churches, the Nave, empty of pews, was public space, used for committee and public meetings, court proceedings, animal sales, parties. Everyone felt a sense of ownership in the nave of a church.

Then along came pews, and all those entertaining activities were banned. Well, not exactly banned, but made so difficult that people started building village halls so that they could have a space to go on doing what they used to use the church for. As a result, generations of people in our communities have come to believe that church is a place for religious people to do religious things, so, not being particularly religious, they don’t go.

Which brings me to the 2nd comment from the Vicar of a rural parish: “There are now households in my parish where no-one has had any involvement with the church for at least five generations”. Hedgehog wasn’t surprised to hear that, but he was very sad.

I wasn’t surprised because, to be honest, pews are so uncomfortable that they prevent the listener from concentrating on a good sermon and also prevent him from falling asleep in a bad one. There is a non-comformist church near where I live where the pews and the spaces between them are so narrow that my bottom-bones are on the edge and my knees are jammed up against the back of the pew in front (and I’m only 5’10”)!

As our homes have become more comfortable, who in their right mind would want to go and sit for an hour in a draughty building on hard, upright benches (usually with a bar along the back which tends to catch one right in the shoulder blades)? I think the gradual decline in churchgoing since the invention of pews tells you the answer: no-one! Let’s be honest: if you go home from church with backache, you’re probably not going to want to go again next week.

It’s also noticeable that the best attended Christian congregations in the UK tend to meet in buildings where they have comfortable seats. So Hedgehog wants to say that, if we are to reverse the decline of the Church in the UK, we have to get rid of the pews - all of them. A case might be made for the retention of comfortable pews (ergonomically designed with sufficient soft padding to prevent them being, literally, a pain in the butt!), but I’ve yet to find one. Away with them all, I say. The only fit place for them is in a museum of human religious folly.

And there’s another, more pressing reason than personal comfort. It is the fact that worship is becoming more informal and less dominated by one leader. The friend who made the first comment at the top of this little article is actually desperate to create ‘café-style’ worship in the nave of his church, but can’t because the building is stuffed with fixed pews. I know of others who want to use their church buildings during the week as drop-in centres, art galleries, concert venues, village post offices, music libraries, internet cafes and a host of other creative ideas, but can’t do any of them because of the fixed pews, and the fixed attitudes of parishioners about retaining the darned things!

Hedgehog applauds creativity in the use of church buildings and in the style and content of worship, but for that to be facilitated, the pews have to go. As I commented several years ago, they might be in demand as seating in pubs, where the flow of alcohol will increase their comfort level as an evening progresses, but as church seating, they were a disaster from the start, and they’re now a noose tightening around our necks.

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