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What do a church-planning consultant, a pastor, and an elderly church member with a bad back all have in common? All three recommended chairs for their church sanctuary seating. While the question sounds like the opening line of a bad joke, the reality is many church leaders are choosing stacking chairs as their seat of choice, and their reasons for doing so are as unique as their churches. For the saint with a bad back, chairs are more comfortable. For the pastor, the flexibility of chairs allows his church to fit in a few more rows of seating for Easter Sunday and Christmas services. And for the church-planning consultant, the option of chairs allowed him to help a debt-laden church postpone a costly new building program by increasing the seats available in the current sanctuary.

"Conservatively speaking, the number of churches using stackable seating is up 175 percent from five years ago," says Bruce Prock, marketing manager at Bertolini Inc. His company commissioned independent marketing surveys of Protestant churches in 1997 and in 2001. These surveys suggest that 20 to 25 percent of all churches now use chairs in the sanctuary.

This is a huge increase from the 1960s, when most churches had pews. The trend began in the 1980s when a growing number of churches opted to build multi-purpose structures that could serve as sanctuaries on Sunday and as gymnasiums or family-life centers during the week. The popularity of these buildings created a demand for flexible seating that could be used for Sunday services, but also could be removed for basketball games on Monday and then reconfigured for concerts on Friday night. Chairs became the seat of choice for multi-purpose buildings, and demand for their use in these informal sanctuaries has grown proportionately. Phil Setsma, president of ChurchPlaza, estimates that approximately 800-1000 new churches each year choose to furnish their sanctuaries with chairs.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, even churches with traditional sanctuaries began to replace pews with chairs. It's estimated there are currently more than one million sanctuary chairs purchased annually.

Cost and flexibility are the main reasons churches give for choosing stackable chairs over other seating possibilities. Kevin Massey, minister of administration and music at First Baptist Church, Port Charlotte, Florida, wanted to refurbish his church's 22-year-old pews, but found it would be cheaper to replace them with new chairs. Costs generally range from $25 to $45 per chair, but increase with optional accessories. Manufacturers recommend churches budget $30 to $35 per chair.

Once the chairs were in place at First Baptist, flexibility became the greatest benefit. "Our church puts on a Broadway-style show each year, and we need to pull out rows of pews in the front in order to fit in the orchestra. It used to take ten guys to move one pew, but now anyone can help move chairs," says Massey. When recent remodeling required Massey to replace the sprinkler system and hang chandeliers from the church's 23-foot ceilings, workers had to bring a small "car" with a lift attached into the sanctuary. The new chairs were moved easily to accommodate the process.

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