WINDHAM, Maine—At first, it just didn't sit well with Nancy Shane when her church decided to switch from pews to chairs.

"My generation grew up in pews," the grandmother of three says. She worried the sanctuary of the Windham First Church of the Nazarene would resemble a movie theater.

Yet, when the pews were removed in September and replaced with burgundy-cushioned chairs, she says she decided God didn't care whether she prayed from a pew, a chair or even the floor.

"I walked in Wednesday night for a prayer meeting and the chairs were there, and they were beautiful," she says. "I thought, 'Nancy Shane, even at 68 years old, young woman, you can change.' "

She isn't the only churchgoer being asked to take a stand on new Sunday seating arrangements. Pews have been part of the Western world's religious landscape for centuries, but now a growing number of churches in the U.S. and U.K. are opting for chairs, sometimes chairs equipped with kneelers.

At bottom: churches want to trim remodeling costs, maximize space flexibility with stackable seating, or create a more approachable atmosphere to draw in unchurched young people.

"Lots of people shy away from a formal church setting. It makes them very nervous," says the Rev. Samuel LaCombe , of the Windham church, who is planning to move the new chairs aside to use the sanctuary for community suppers. "Now, what's so scary about beans and hot dogs and yeast rolls? Not much."

The dispute is the latest sticking point between traditionalists and those who believe old-guard churches have to modernize to broaden their appeal. Church Executive Magazine last year called it "Chairs vs. Pews." A blog on Religious Product News dubbed it "the great pew debate."

"I've had a couple of cases where it got ugly," says Paul Lodholz , a principal with Ziegler Cooper Architects, a Houston church-design company.

In the Church of England, rows have erupted over decisions to remove pews, forcing churches to delay remodeling plans for months while protests wind through diocesan courts.

Daniel Goleman mentions a phrase in his new book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. It's "continuous partial attention." It's not a new phrase; it's supposedly been around for some 15 years. But it is both descriptive and damning at the same time.

Continuous partial attention means that we are paying attention to many things, but at a superficial level. We're never completely tuning in to one thing because of the other stimuli competing for our attention.

• It's checking in on Facebook while the professor lectures.

• It's pulling out the smartphone while on a date with your wife.

• It's tweeting in the middle of a sermon.

• It's missing out on what's here because we're wondering what's going on somewhere else that we're missing.

• It's never being able to pray because we're too distracted.

At LifeWay Research, we recently studied the variety of ways pastors use the Bible by looking at 450 different sermons (all by different preachers). We gave our research team the audio files of these sermons and some objective questions about how the preacher handled God's Word. Let me share about the research and my views on preaching at the same time.

In these sermons, the preachers handled God's Word differently. The way pastors organized their sermons varied widely. Half of pastors traveled verse-by-verse through a passage, and almost half organized their sermons around a theme. Almost one out of five pastors named and explained a Greek word in their sermon. More than half explained verses by using other verses in the Bible.

Even though different preachers handle the Word differently, I believe they're all obligated to teach it as authoritative, not merely as a scriptural footnote proving something they already wanted to say. Four things have to be true about a pastor's handling of the Bible if that pastor is to preach authoritatively.

Our central task as preachers is to present God's Word. Paul asked a series of questions that should haunt all of us who preach: "How can they call on him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher?" (Romans 10:14 HCSB) A preacher isn't a self-help guru. A preacher is not a political activist or an entertainer. Those who preach are truth-dispensers, proclaimers of the Word. If we don't do our job as preachers, people will not hear the good news, and therefore can't respond to it. What we do is crucial.

At a surprisingly high level, most of the preachers we studied seemed to understand the need for the text. Four out of five of these sermons conveyed the correct meaning of the chosen text according to our research team's analysis (which was not denominationally specific). I'm encouraged by this. People will not really hear God's Word in our churches if we're not preaching it accurately.

Of course, you can preach the Word accurately, and still no one will really "hear" it; we must share God's Word in the way our hearers will understand it. No matter how accurately the Bible is preached, our message can get lost behind jargon and phrases that mean nothing to our congregations. This doesn't mean that we should gloss over difficult words within Scripture. But we do need to explain the original language and "churchy" words we use. Words we only hear in church—such as "holy," "righteousness" and "propitiation"—can help hearers understand God's truth only if properly clarified.

Many of the preachers we studied did this. In fact, 41 percent explained at least one church or theological word during their sermon. Another 21 percent avoided such words altogether. This means more than half of the preachers we studied either avoided or at least explained some of the church or theological words they used. While this is notable, it still means that one out of three preachers are not speaking in the vernacular of their audience—at least if the uninitiated or unchurched are in attendance.

Paul could have just asked, "How can they believe without a preacher?" But he didn't. Without people hearing—really hearing what you say—they will not believe the message.