To Kneel or Not to Kneel--the Posture of Prayer Is Taking New Shape : Worship: Prominent evangelical pastors are calling on their flocks to genuflect. Meanwhile, U.S. Catholics are considering a proposal to make the position optional.

It used to be very simple: Catholics knelt, Baptists did not.

But like so many other things, the posture of prayer has become so much more complicated in the 1990s. Prominent evangelical pastors are calling their flocks to their knees, while American Catholics are considering a proposal to make kneeling optional.

Even Presbyterians who prided themselves on never leaving their seats have been lifted from them by folk guitar services and the charismatic movement.

As Easter approaches, it is getting so you cannot tell the kneelers from the standers--even with a denominational score card.

“Posture means a lot,” said Lawrence Hoffman, former president of the North American Academy of Religion. “Over the centuries, religions developed body postures about what they want to say of themselves and of the world and of God.”

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus kneels down in Gethsemane shortly before his arrest to utter the famous prayer: “Not my will, but yours, be done.” In his letter to the Philippians, the apostle Paul says “at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on Earth and under the Earth.”

But evidence indicates that although the primitive Christians practiced kneeling as a penitential rite, they celebrated the Resurrection by standing with arms outstretched. Until the end of the Middle Ages, seats largely were reserved only for the minister and the aged or disabled, and kneeling benches were a later architectural addition.

During the Middle Ages, the church began to emphasize the humility of the individual before God--and kneeling became the vogue. “People felt less worthy, the notion of sin loomed large in their minds,” said Father Richard Vosko, a church design consultant based in Albany, N.Y.

After the Second Vatican Council, Catholic churches did away with kneeling while receiving Communion, in part to emphasize the dignity of the human being before God. But kneeling stayed elsewhere in the Mass, and the U.S. bishops kept the kneeling posture from the beginning of the Eucharistic prayer to the “Great Amen” at the end.

“In the United States, we kneel more than almost any country in the world,” Vosko said.

That may be changing. In Albany and elsewhere, some Catholic churches undergoing renovations are doing away with kneelers.

The Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions has asked the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy to consider making kneeling optional during the Eucharistic prayer before Communion.

Liturgists seeking change are not against kneeling as a posture of adoration or penitence, but question whether it would not be better to stand to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, Vosko said.

“When one is praying a prayer of thanksgiving, it seems a more appropriate posture is . . . an affirming posture,” he said.

“The common posture of the assembly is symbolic of what they believe, and what we believe is that Jesus Christ, who suffered, rose from the dead. . . . And that gets us back to the early Christians--standing,” he says.

There also is a movement among some Lutherans and Episcopalians to stand. “Kneeling (is seen) as more like a medieval custom that owes more to feudalism than primitive religious practice,” said Gordon Lathrop, a liturgy professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

“Probably the most striking and winning thing is that people see each other face to face,” he said.

But many people in the pews object to tampering with a sacred ritual.

“I’ve heard people say to me fiercely: ‘I kneel nowhere else, but it’s immensely important to me to kneel before God,’ ” Lathrop said.

Philip Kiernan, head of the Albany chapter of Catholics United for the Faith, said that in lifting churchgoers to their feet the church hierarchy runs the risk of losing followers’ faith.

“What should a Christian do less than kneel before our God and Savior?” he asked. “If you’re too lazy or too foolish to kneel in front of God . . . why don’t you want to? What’s wrong with you? It’s a bit of an arrogance, isn’t it?”

Kiernan would find unexpected support among evangelical Christians, though they have long adhered to Reformer John Knox’s warning that kneeling is a “Romish” deception.

“We Americans are very egalitarian. Egalitarianism is fine, with one major exception, and that’s God,” said Dean Merrill, a vice president of Focus on the Family, an evangelical group. “Kneeling is a nonverbal way of reminding us who’s who in this discussion.”

At the last Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, about one-third to half of the people attending a solemn assembly knelt during prayer.

In 1991, Charles Stanley, a former Southern Baptist Convention president and television evangelist from Atlanta, slowly encouraged an annual gathering of influential politicians and businessmen to get down on their knees and humble themselves before God.

Although kneeling was rejected by Puritans, said Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., there is historical precedent for the posture--in the revivalistic camp meeting tradition of evangelicalism.