I visited a church once where during a song set the worship leader told us, the congregation, to assume whatever posture would allow us to most fully enter into worship.  Some people raised their hands.  Some closed their eyes.  I knelt.  There in the darkness, surrounded by guitar-driven Christian emo music, I was alone in being on my knees.

Why don’t we kneel more often in church?  

In the Bible, kneeling is a fundamental posture of worship.  When Solomon dedicates the temple to the Lord in Jerusalem, “He knelt on his knees in the presence of the whole assembly of Israel, and spread out his hands toward heaven” (2 Chronicles 6:13).  Psalm 95:6 sings: “O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!”  The prophet Daniel would “get down on his knees three times a day to pray to his God and praise him” (6:10).  In Gethsemane, Jesus “knelt down and prayed” (Luke 22:41).  Paul wrote to the Ephesians saying “I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name” (Ephesians 3:15).  Why not us?

Of course, in high-churchy settings, kneeling in worship is assumed.  Fold the pads down and get on your knees during confession or the communion prayer.  Or on the other end of the spectrum, I’ve worshiped in Pentecostal settings where low padded rectangular “altars” were set on the ground at the front of the sanctuary.  People were invited to come forward and kneel on the altars as a way to seek the Lord more deeply.  Or once when worshiping with a plain Mennonite congregation, I was caught flat-footed when the whole congregation—men on one side and women on the other—suddenly turned in unison to kneel in the pew.  I was standing alone with all eyes on me until I caught up and knelt down.

But in the churches I’ve served, propose that the people kneel to pray or kneel to confess their sins or kneel for the communion prayer, and they’ll look at you like you just sprouted a mitre.  Isn’t kneeling Catholic, for Pete’s sake?

Yet I’m convinced kneeling is one of the foundational biblical postures of prayer and worship.  What if we reclaimed it?

Posture shapes prayer.  For that matter, posture shapes everything.  We’re human beings, composite creatures of flesh and spirit.  The body gives shape to the soul.  That’s why the human warmth of a look or a gesture or a hand or a touch communicates so much, so profoundly.  Calling a hospitalized person is good.  Visiting and sitting beside them is better.  Our bodily presence and posture communicate something.

So too with worship.  “Glorify God in your body,” wrote the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 6:20).  How we position our bodies in worship communicates something.  Sit for an hour looking toward a stage, and your body tells your brain that you’re attending a show.  Watch it.  Applaud it.  Consume it. We naturally conclude that we could do the same thing at home over the internet (and probably with better preaching).  Why go?

But if worship is embodied, and thus presence and place mean something, then we must ask how our bodily posture glorifies God. That includes kneeling.

Kneeling shapes reverence in us.  It schools us in humility before God.  Kneeling is eschatological, a glimpse of the day when Christ returns and “every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Philippians 2:10).  We’re doing something irreducibly sacred when we gather for worship.  In worship, we gather together in the name of Jesus.  Let’s kneel before our Maker and Lord and Savior and God.

Kneeling not only gives reverent shape to our spirits in worship, it also forms us in the culture of the gospel—over and against the neuroses of our own cultures.  If we were in the regular habit of kneeling in worship, would we be less apt to see ourselves as consumers and more open to grow as children of God?

Following Jesus means worshiping him.  Daily discipleship flows from reverent worship.  Infants have to crawl before they walk.  Maybe disciples have to learn to kneel before they can fully walk with Him.