Reaching out to the wider community

A Church of England book has recommended that overweight or bald people should be regarded as worshippers with ‘special needs’ alongside the blind, the deaf, very short people, and readers of tabloid newspapers. The advice is part of an initiative to make churches more friendly. It says that bald people could be “in trouble from those overhead radiant heaters some churches have unwittingly installed” and that special arrangements might need to be made for people who are overweight. “Some pew spaces and chairs are embarrassingly inadequate for what is known in church circles as ‘the wider community'