It’s hard to retain a sense of awe when pews are replaced by Ikea

It’s the moment I love most on a country walk. No, not the thirstquenching pint at the village pub (though that comes a close second), but pushing open the heavy wooden door of the parish church. Each interior is different but also familiar. There’s the heavy scent of candle wax, flowers and a touch of incense. Then the carved pulpit, stained glass depicting the church’s patron, memorial plaques dedicated to long-dead rectors and young men lost in war, and dark, heavily polished pews.

But in more and more Church of England parishes, those pews are falling out of favour with vicars, who, fretting about money, think the answer is to chuck out the benches – even ones past parishioners paid for – and put in their place a pile of stackable plastic. The idea is that, outside services, the chairs can be moved aside to make way for dancing and partying, so long as it raises much-needed funds.

Sitting down in church has not always been the norm. In medieval England, people mostly stood, except for the elderly and the sick who could rest on stone benches to the side. But the Reformation and its emphasis on often lengthy sermonising meant seats became the vogue for people to listen in more comfort, or possibly nod off.

Today, however, pews are frowned upon, and not only by vicars. June Rodgers, an ecclesiastical judge, has criticised people for being “besotted” with architectural heritage when she ruled that the Victorian church of St Philip and St James in Cheltenham can throw out its pews as part of a refurbishment to make way for space for banquets, exhibitions, concerts, workshops and a café.

All worthy causes, no doubt, and churches certainly need money to survive, even large ones like Bath Abbey, which is also dumping its pews to make more room for events other than religious services.

This focus on secular fundraising, though, surely risks not only alienating people like me – heritageloving believers – but also those who the sociologists call “believing not belonging”. Statistics for regular worship attendance may show steady decline, but plenty of people still find meaning in choral music and solace not only in the soaring fan vaulting of a cathedral but also amid the well-worn stone of the humblest ecclesial building.

For them “a twitch upon the thread”, as Evelyn Waugh put it, comes from the loveliness of an English church. I’m not convinced that when St Peter’s or St Mary’s seems more like a pub or a shop, with a set of spindly chairs with names like Gunde or Bernhard from Ikea, and a glass meeting pod where the pews used to be, it is really going to offer that same spiritual ambience.

Catholics, unlike their Anglican counterparts, frown on turning hallowed ground into a banqueting hall. It’s not the moneymaking, per se, to which they object, but using the place for secular activity. And the clue as to why is a small red lamp always found in a Catholic Church: it denotes the Real Presence of Christ – consecrated communion hosts reserved in a tabernacle. That means it’s too sacred a space to allow in the 21st century equivalent of the moneychangers in the temple.

Yet the revenue-raising continues unobtrusively. All those little candles, called votive lights, you find in front of statues, produce a steady income. Perhaps the next church in need of cash could bring those in rather than take the pews out. FOLLOW Catherine Pepinster on Twitter @Cpspeptalk; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion