COVID-19: Seating capacity adjustment

Like most congregations, the church that I lead has suspended in-person gatherings in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. For the first several weeks of shutdown, our focus was on pivoting to an online-only model for our worship gatherings and discipleship ministries. Now that we are over the hump on that, our focus has begun to shift toward what needs to happen before we can resume in-person worship gatherings. One of those things is the reevaluation of our facility’s seating capacity.

For decades, one maxim of church growth principles has been that the sustainable size of a congregation is limited to approximately 80% of maximum seating capacity. That is, while people will gladly fill a sanctuary to maximum capacity for weddings, funerals, and other special events, the average attendance of typical worship services will hit a ceiling when 8 of 10 seats are occupied. The reasoning is that newcomers receive the impression that there is no room for them.

Consider, however, the realities of our new world. Namely, the rules of social distancing mandate a margin of six feet between households. It does not take a rocket scientist to recognize that seating capacity is going to be reduced, but by how much?

To answer that question, calculate the theoretical maximum capacity of your sanctuary. In its present configuration, our church has 14 16-foot pews. Estimating 24 inches per person, that equates to a maximum capacity of 112 seats. In a pinch, we could likely squeeze a few more people into the sanctuary, but this number will suffice for right now.

Second, calculate the average size of your congregation’s regular attenders. In our church, the magic number is approximately 2.25. Of course, we have families that are larger than this, and we have households that are smaller than this. This, however, helps us to understand how much space the average household will take on the pew: using our estimate of 24 inches per person, the average family will actually occupy 4.5 feet of pew space.

Now, divide the space the family will actually occupy by the total space they will require, including the social distance margin, to discover the maximum percentage of the seats which can be occupied. In our case, that amounts to roughly 43% (i.e., 4.5 / 10.5).

Forty-three percent of our church’s 112 seats, or 48 seats, may be occupied by people in order to maintain adequate margins for social distancing. We will call this our social distancing maximum, and it is only slightly worse than the 50% occupation recommended by our governor for restaurants and other businesses as they prepare to re-open, but we must keep in mind that this represents our new maximum seating capacity. That is, this is as full as our sanctuary can be during this season of social distancing. But what of the 80% rule?

You can expect that guests will err on the safe side. In other words, if they walk into a service where the congregation is even approaching the social distancing maximum, they will walk out. We should, therefore, expect that the 80% rule is still applicable, but it will now be applied to the social distancing maximum. In our church, this translates to a sustainable attendance ceiling of 38 people or approximately 17 families. Incidentally, 80% of 43% amounts to 34.4% of the maximum seating capacity. We shall call this our sustainable social distancing capacity.

Here is where things get interesting. If our sustainable social distancing capacity is 38 people, then we could not safely seat a typical pre-COVID Sunday-morning crowd. Fortunately, I doubt very much that everyone will show up for the first few weeks after we resume in-person gatherings. Thus, we will have a bit of time to consider our options. Yet, as the crowd returns over the successive months, and especially if we have guests who are now looking for a place to worship, we will need to seriously contemplate creative solutions to raise our sustainable social distancing capacity. After all, the conventional answer of simply adding more chairs will no longer work.

The first solution, of course, is to continue the online worship service. This provides an option for those who are unable to attend in-person gatherings for whatever reason. Actually, I would submit that producing a weekly online worship service is no longer an optional thing.

Second, we may increase the number of services offered. This, would increase the number of opportunities for people to attend, thus increasing the seating capacity. However, we must also remember that COVID-19 has increased the difficulty of simply adding a service: we must be able to properly sanitize the facility between services. Thus, these new services must be scheduled accordingly.

Finally, we can provide an overflow room that is equipped with an A/V feed of our service, pre-set with properly spaced chairs, and staffed with a hospitality team. Of course, this option presents its own challenges, including the need to recruit additional volunteers to serve as a host. You absolutely do not want people to sit alone in the overflow room!

It should also be noted that your mileage may vary. That is, your church’s sustainable social distancing capacity will be affected by whether or not you utilize chairs or pews. So also, it may be affected if your rows were spaced too closely and you must now remove a row or two.

Truly, recognizing and addressing the operational challenges presented by COVID-19 is a daunting proposition. In the midst of all the other stuff that we have to juggle, though, we must not forget to adjust our expectations for seating capacities.