Dear People of St. David’s,
This Sunday, our Adult and Youth Forum will be a question-and-answer session (the BIG Questions Panel). At the church I used to serve as rector, I called a session such as this “Stump the Priest.” You bring the question, and I’ll answer it! Please believe me when I tell you, that my tongue was stuck so firmly in my cheek that it was hard to make the announcement. As though I (or any other priest) have easy answers to your deeply pondered questions of faith! But it is fun to wonder together about why the church does this instead of that.
It reminds me of the time when my old arthritic knees were bothering me more than usual, and I was relying on a cane for support. At a meeting at a church not my own I sat next to a lovely man who turned out to be an orthopedic surgeon. Someone asked him why their knee replacement had not been successful, and he said, “Well, knees are complicated.” It was a great answer, and it spared this good man from being asked to diagnose his questioner or me!
Knees are complicated and so is most of what we do in worship. Stand, sit, or kneel? Bow or genuflect? Incense or not? Sing or speak or delight in silence? Do what everyone else does, or let your individuality stand out? And what about crossing myself? The quick answer is, it’s complicated. But the longer wondering is worth it, I think. After all, we bring our bodies with us to church and the more we engage our bodies, the more engaged we are in what we are thinking, praying, and learning.
You may have noticed recently in our worship at St. David’s, you are not receiving a lot of verbal instructions to sit, stand, or kneel. We clergy have discussed this amongst ourselves, and the truth is that we don’t want to be in the position of telling you what to do. We are working together to have the service bulletins coordinate with the Book of Common Prayer to give you clues as to what posture is traditional at particular points in the service and let you choose for yourself what works best. Please remember this, our beloved prayer book did not consult any orthopedic surgeons before writing the rubrics. Please adopt postures of worship that are best for the health of your original or replaced joints!
Broadly speaking, the prayer book directions suggest that standing is for proclamation, kneeling is for prayer, and sitting is for teaching. So, we stand to sing hymns, which are a kind of proclamation. We sit to hear the lessons read and the sermon preached, moments of teaching. You will notice some of what we do in worship is two things at the same time. When the Gospel is read, we stand, because in addition to being taught what Jesus did or said, we are also proclaiming that we believe it. When the priest is offering the prayer of consecration over the bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist, the people are at once praying that God will be present with us and proclaiming that Jesus is Lord. Stand or kneel? What helps your spiritual engagement?
Recently, someone proclaimed to me that, “All people like to do what everyone else is doing. That’s human nature.” I thought, “is it?” What about the people who enjoy standing out in the crowd? That’s human nature, too. It’s not just knees that are complicated. Humans are complicated, too.
In his wickedly satirical book, “The Screwtape Letters,” the popular theologian C.S. Lewis imagined a correspondence between a senior devil and his apprentice nephew. The senior devil described a worship service where the person who found great spiritual comfort in crossing himself refrained from doing so if he stood next to a person who found the practice distracting. The senior devil hated moments like that, he said, those moments when the people started behaving in ways that were most helpful to each other.
Whether you sit, stand, or kneel, I hope that you will join us for worship on Sunday and then please do bring your questions to the Forum following the 9:15 a.m. service. We priests will do our very best to wonder with you as we proclaim that God loves us in every posture.
Peace,
The Rev. Nancy Webb Stroud
Priest Associate
Photo: St. David’s parishioners standing as Bishop Daniel G. P. Gutiérrez celebrates the Holy Eucharist during our Sunday morning 9:15 a.m. worship service in the Chapel with confirmations on Sunday, June 8, 2025. Photo by Caroline Brimberry for St. David’s.
Published on November 6, 2025.