- guardian.co.uk, Friday January 12 2001 02.53 GMT
The Rt Rev Stephen Pedley, bishop of Lancaster, has attacked parishioners for not doing enough kneeling in church. But they have hit back by claiming there is no longer enough legroom to do so in comfort, and having chairs instead of pews makes the operation hazardous.
"I have noticed the death of kneeling," the bishop complained this month in See, the Blackburn diocesan magazine. "People crouch, they stand, they sit, in extremis they appear to lie down: but hardly anyone kneels.
"Many hands and fingers are filling our churches with kneelers. But who is using them for their original purpose? What do people do with them? Sit on them? Make castles of them? Throw them? Toss the hassock? Anything, it seems, but kneel on them."
He said the church's latest liturgy, Common Worship, introduced before Christmas, scarcely mentioned the practice, except for a note on page 330 saying kneeling was "appropriate" for certain prayers.
"Why is it only appropriate? When is it inappropriate? Why on one occasion rather than another?" he asked.
In the Church Times, Ian Wells of Preston replied: "As reader in my parish church, I have a stall with plenty of legroom, but when I am in the congregational seats in many other churches I find there is simply no room to kneel."
In churches that had replaced pews with chairs, he said, "any attempt to kneel results in your chair or the one in front moving over the bare stone with an ear-splitting screech. This is especially effective in Blackburn Cathedral.
"Not kneeling is not necessarily a sign of lack of reverence. It is often simple prudence ... [It] also lets you hold an order of service without the risk of using the back of the person in front of you as a prop."
