“Should our church purchase 21″ Worship Chairs or 20″ Church Chairs?”

Churches often wrestle with how wide of a church chair they should purchase.  Here are a few points to consider if your church is considering new church chairs and worship seating.

• The most recommended width for worship seating today and certainly the width most commonly purchased are church chairs that are 20″ in width.  However, there are a couple of important factors to be aware of.  First, there some worship chair importers who consistently advertise their church chairs as being 21″ wide.  We have found though many times that when these chairs are obtained by the church, they in fact are actually 20.5″ wide.  The worship chair importer has simply chosen to overstate or round up the size of their chairs.  Second, there are some church chair manufacturers, who in contrast to the above, state that their church chairs are 20″ wide.   But when obtained, their chairs are found to also be 20.5″ wide.  These manufacturers understate or round down the width of their chairs.  As a result, we have seen churches literally choose chairs because they were advertised as being 21″ in width over chairs advertised as being 20″ in width, when in fact the two chairs were actually identical in width.  We recommend that a church pull out a tape measure and measure the width of the chairs they are considering for themselves to verify their church chairs are as wide as they are portended to me.

• There are of course narrower church chairs that are priced relatively low and are 18.5″ wide.  These worship chairs are advertised across the Internet and they are so effectively photographed that they will often seem larger and wider on your computer screen than you will find they actually are when you sit on one in person.  With the “spreading of America” these 18.5″ church chairs are simply NOT wide enough for almost all churches.  As a result, it will be difficult for a church using 18.5″ wide worship to chairs to maximize their seating capacity as people do not like to be so crowded together each Sunday.  We regularly visit with churches who report to us their “mistake” in purchasing 18.5″ church chairs.

• There are then also wider worship chairs that are available, the most common width of which is a 22″ wide church chair.  With a 22″ wide church chair each attendee will have a lot of personal space to enjoy.  The disadvantages with this wide of a church chair are numerous though.  First, 22″ wide worship chairs are more costly to purchase.  Second, 22″ wide church chairs are far heavier to move around.  And third, 22″ wide worship seating will decrease your seating capacity by about 10% when compared to 20.5″ wide church chairs.  Because of these factors, we find that only about 5% of our church customers opt for 22″ wide church chairs.  While we do provide them on occasion, because of the three reasons above, most churches choose not to purchase 22″ wide worship seating.

At Church Furniture Partner, we provide churches financial savings on church chairs from nearly every church chair manufacturer and importer available today, in all width variations.  We do have though our favorite chairs that we consider the best values for churches today.  We’d love to help your church save money on new church chairs.  Feel free to contact us at any time to allow us to do so.