Save the pews!

The Wall Street Journal finds time and space to do an article on churches replacing pews with chairs: Churches Take a Stand on Pews, Replacing Them With Chairs

Oh, the horror!

Replacing the lovely, sanctified, dignified, pews with vulgar, common chairs. Chrome and foam not nicely worked wood?

So, like we're going to start snide remarks about churchgoers as those who "warm the chairs" rather than "warm the pews"?

Communications from the pastor will change titles, from "Pulpit to Pew" to "Pulpit to Chair"?

Pews are wonderful. They are communal. They don't define spaces as nineteen or twenty-one inches like chairs. You aren't forced to take your nineteen inches and then just overlap the derriere for whatever more you need. In a pew you get as much as you need.

Want a nice comfortable chair? Go to a movie.

Chairs. Bah humbug! Next the pastor will stop wearing a tie, get a tattoo, spike his hair, and let his shirt hang out. Music will be reduced to umpteen verses of some catchy six word chorus. You will be debited for your offering automatically and no offering plates will be passed.

Yeah, right. I got it. Pews keep those folks who are unused to churchy stuff away, as if God is powerless, overwhelmed in the face of long wooden seats. Hardly.

The article notes,

...the share of pew sales is declining, while cushioned metal chairs, complete with hymnal racks, are now an estimated 35% of the market, says marketing director Rick Mueller . A decade ago, these chairs were minor players, he says.

Plodder is defiant in the face of this trend. "Chairs be doggoned!" sayeth he while seated in his pew with geriatric equanimity.

Is nothing sacred?

God save the pew!