Standing, Sitting, Pews, and Kneeling

What you'll notice

Everybody's standing, and it's been forty minutes. If there are pews, people use them the way you'd use the rail on a ferry: leaning, resting, sitting for a stretch, then standing back up for no cue you can hear. If there are no pews, there's a row of chairs along the walls with a few older people in them, and a lot of open floor, and children sitting on it. Almost nobody kneels. Then, deep in the second half, in some churches everyone goes down at once, and in others nobody does. There's no bulletin that says when to sit. There is, it turns out, a rule, and almost everyone is following a looser version of it.

What it's called

There's no special word for this. Hapgood's Service Book puts it flatly: "Only two attitudes are recognized as befitting the house of God: standing and kneeling." Sitting is proper at "some moments of the service," but "usually it is tolerated only as a concession to physical weakness."¹ The full kneel with your forehead to the floor is a prostration (a bow to the ground; Greek metanoia, the same word as repentance; Slavonic zemnoy poklon, "bow to the ground"). A bow from the waist is just a bow.

What's actually happening

Orthodox Christians pray on their feet. Standing is the native posture of the Liturgy, the way sitting is the native posture of a lecture, and for most of Christian history, in most of the world, there was nothing in a church to sit on.

The rule about kneeling is old. The Council of Nicaea in 325, the one that gave us the Creed, closed with a canon on posture. Some Christians were kneeling "on the Lord's Day and in the days of Pentecost," and the council ruled "that prayer be made to God standing," so that practice would be the same everywhere.² The canon gives no other reason, and "the days of Pentecost" is usually read as the fifty days from Pascha (Easter) to Pentecost. The reason shows up elsewhere. Saint Basil, a generation later, said we stand to pray on the day of the Resurrection to remind ourselves of the grace we've been given, and that every time we kneel and rise again we act out our fall through sin and God's calling us back to heaven.³ In 692 the Council in Trullo made the Sunday rule explicit: no kneeling from Saturday Vespers until Sunday evening, "in honour of Christ's resurrection."⁴ That canon is about Sundays only; the fifty days come from Nicaea, and Saint Germanus ties them to the same joy.⁵ Kneeling is for Lent, weekdays, confession, and the moments when you've got something to be sorry about. Sunday is for standing up straight, because you've been raised.

Why it matters

Jesus assumed you'd be on your feet: "whenever you stand praying" (Mark 11:25). The tax collector in his parable, "standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven" (Luke 18:13), and he went home justified; the posture of repentance in that story is standing with your head down. Standing is what you do when the King walks in, and he walks in at every Liturgy. You don't sit down for that. You might kneel for it, which is why the Church had to write a canon.

Where it came from

Pews are Western and fairly recent; medieval churches in the West had open floors too, and benches arrived with long sermons. Old-country Orthodox churches mostly still have none: Greek and Romanian churches line the walls with tall wooden stalls you lean in, Russian and Serbian churches with chairs for the elderly. In America, the historian Matthew Namee found that most Greek parishes founded in the 1900s and 1910s began without pews, with wall "leaners" instead; pews spread mainly in the 1920s, and parishes usually chose to add them rather than inheriting them with a bought Protestant building.⁶ Today most Greek and many Antiochian parishes in America have pews, and many Russian, Serbian, and convert parishes don't.

Kneeling at the consecration on Sunday is the honest exception. Slavic parishes generally stand. Many Greek American parishes kneel at the epiclesis (the prayer calling the Holy Spirit down on the gifts) anyway, and have for generations. In Greece the question went to the Holy Synod. Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens reported that in October 1999 a synodal committee proposed that Sunday kneeling at the consecration "is not required" and "is not imposed. It is simply tolerated." He read that as tolerance by oikonomia (economy, a pastoral dispensation; Greek kat' oikonomian), with the rule itself still against kneeling, and he recommended a deep bow at the consecration instead.⁷ That's one bishop's reading, not a ruling for the whole Church. The old texts also pull in two directions on what "kneeling" means. As Christodoulos reports it, Saint Nikodemos read Nicaea's canon as forbidding prayer on bent knees, not the prostrations of veneration;⁸ Hapgood's Service Book describes the Sunday rule as forbidding "reverences to the earth," that is, prostrations: "On Sundays and Feast Days, with few exceptions, the rubric of the Church does not permit kneeling; that is, reverences to the earth."⁹ This guide doesn't settle that. The canons have never been repealed, and they're kept unevenly from parish to parish. That's not hypocrisy. It's a Church that leaves its rules on the books and lets the people love God in the posture they were raised in. So on a Sunday you may see the whole church standing, or half of it on its knees at the epiclesis. Do what the people around you are doing.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: stand when you can, sit when you need to, and apologize for neither. Stand for sure at the Small Entrance, the Gospel, the Great Entrance, the Creed, the Anaphora (the great eucharistic prayer), the Lord's Prayer, and Communion. On Sundays, follow your parish on kneeling and don't correct your neighbor. In Lent, expect prostrations and do them. If your knees are gone, a bow from the waist counts in God's bookkeeping, and a deep bow at the consecration is exactly what one archbishop of Athens recommended instead of kneeling.

If you're visiting: stand when everyone stands, sit when you're tired, and nobody's judging. If the people around you kneel, you may kneel or stay standing; both are fine, and standing is the ancient rule anyway, so you'll have the canon on your side. Baby, bad back, walker: sit, and sit up front if you want to see.

Field Note: the leaning stalls. In Greek, Athonite, and Romanian churches the walls are lined with tall wooden stalls (stasidia; Romanian strane) with a fold-down seat and high armrests. You stand in them, lean, and perch on the ledge when the vigil hits hour four. They're the Church's compromise between standing and sitting and the best piece of furniture in Christendom. American parishes with pews don't have them, which is a shame.

Go deeper

• Mark 11:20–25 and Luke 18:9–14.
• Nicaea I, canon 20, and Trullo, canon 90 (NPNF2 14).
• Saint Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.66 (NPNF2 8).
• Hapgood, Service Book (1906), p. xxxiii.

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