WOULD you like more children and families to come and worship in your church? If you would, then the good news is that a recent and very successful innovation in the Church of England will be able to help you. Bubble Church is a high-energy, high- intensity workout using puppets for children and families (News, 19 September 2025). There is a problem, however. If your church has fixed pews, it cannot host a Bubble Church service, because children (and their parents) will need to move around.
At St John’s, Hythe, in Winchester diocese, Bubble Church has grown from one to 20 families over the course of a year. Their (pewless) church is full of children and families. Other churches report similar success. One thing that these churches have in common is that there are no pews getting in the way. They have replaced them with chairs, which can be moved around to create a flexible space. Churches with pews are a hostile environment for young children and families.
Pews are all about control. In medieval English churches, there were no pews, and the congregation was able to move around during the service. As time went on, richer families wanted control over seating, which they could call their own and which only they could sit on.
Then, as the Reformation took hold, sermons became much longer, and so congregations became passive and confined to pews. The practice of charging people to sit in certain pews became an industry. Today, PCCs can control the space in churches by refusing to give up their pews, which means that modern and inclusive services in church are blocked.
There are, of course, practical reasons that some churches hesitate to replace their pews with chairs. Moving and storing chairs needs willing volunteers and planning. Chairs take up more room than pews; so a church can always accommodate more people with pews than it could with chairs (which is why the Victorians stuffed churches full with as many income-generating pews as possible). One of the Church of England’s priorities is to double the number of children and young people; but, when children and adults respond so well to new pewless forms of worship, pews represent a real barrier to this ambition.
I AM an unlikely advocate for the removal of pews. As a traditionalist, my ideal service involves the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and hymns such as “Onward, Christian soldiers”. But far more important than my old fashioned preferences is the fact that modern society needs modern and inclusive forms of worship. This makes it essential that the C of E adapt its churches, so that modern services can take place, together with the traditional ones.
Another problem with pews is the damage that they cause to our bodies. In the church that I attend, the Victorian pews were designed to make people lean forward slightly, to put them off balance, so as to ensure their discomfort and to make sure that they paid attention. Sitting through a service on a pew pretty much guarantees a bad back. People with conditions such as arthritis, joint replacements, and neurological conditions need the support offered by chairs. Pews are a menace to people with disabilities.
In Gaulby Parish Church, in Leicestershire, back problems caused by pews were a crucial factor in their removal. Back pain and musculoskeletal problems are a huge drain on the NHS: they represent 30 per cent of GP consultations; so, why doesn’t the C of E do its bit and get rid of the pews that contribute towards this?
Since too many PCCs will never give up their pews, the General Synod should take a central decision to legislate to remove all pews and replace them with chairs. On Sunday 9 June 1549, the Government banned church services in Latin, and moved the whole country to services in English — a decision that was traumatic at the time (it led to armed revolt in the south-west), but today most surely agree that it was a good thing. In the same way, banning pews today would cause lots of grumbling in the short term, but it would bring a breath of fresh air into churches.
ONE of the challenges that churches face when seeking to remove their pews is the determined opposition from organisations such as the Victorian Society, which churches are required to consult as part of the process to obtain permission to remove them. Preserving Victorian buildings may be very desirable, but the idea that Victorian ideas about pews should block inclusive and back-friendly forms of worship in the 21st century is unacceptable. The Church of England should put the Victorian Society firmly in its place (some time in the 19th century) and ignore its protests.
St Matthew’s Gospel records Jesus’s welcoming attitude to children, “Then there were brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the Kingdom of heaven.” The problem for the Church of England today is that, where there are churches with pews, there is too much suffering and there are too few children.
David Lee is a historian. His latest book, Hitler’s Crime Fighter: The extraordinary life of Konrad Morgen, is published by Biteback Publishing.