What are pews used for in a church?
copy and paste this: (your teacher will be so pleased that you can copy and paste from Wikipedia !) A pew is a long bench used for seating members of a church’s congregation. Churches were not commonly furnished with permanent pews before the coming of the Protestant Reformation. The rise of the sermon as a central act of Christian worship, especially in Protestantism, made the pew an indispensable item of church furniture. Most Orthodox churches do not have pews; they have stands instead. In some churches, pews were installed at the expense of the congregants, and were their personal property; there was no general public seating in the church itself. In these churches, pew deeds recorded title to the pews, and were used to convey them. Pews were originally purchased from the church by their owners under this system, and the purchase price of the pews went to the costs of building the church. When the pews were privately owned, their owners sometimes enclosed them in pew boxes, and the
Pews, long benches used for seating, only appeared at the end of the medieval period. Often pews had carved bench-ends with animal or foliage designs. From the 1600s through the mid 1800s, churchgoers of most denominations were seated in their houses of worship according to social rank, whether by assignment or purchase. This expressed a nearly universal Christian perception of social rank as part of a divinely ordered hierarchy of creation. The highest ranking pews were close to the pulpit, the lowest furthest from the pulpit. Private pews gave rise to the practice of numbering pews for easy record keeping. Some pews were set aside as general seating for special groups. Details varied according to town, location, date and circumstances. Variants included reserving seats for adolescents, the poor, widows, the hard-of-hearing, etc. From the 1840s to the 1930s churches gradually shifted from private pews to free and open seating, giving rise to the term “free church”. Old pew numbers and
Pews are made for sitting on – they are a long seat and there are heaps of them in a church – they are usually arranged in rows on each side of the church with space for an aisle between to allow access to the seats and for going to the front of the church for communion etc Some of them have a prayer kneeling pad attached to the back of the pew which the people seated in the pew behind it can kneel on for when there are prayers etc Some pews are quite comfortable and others are not – meant to help you stay awake if the sermon or service is a bit lengthy See reference below for any points I may have missed
