Sixty years ago, a pastor wearing a Hawaiian print shirt during worship would have been considered a sign of mental unbalance in most American congregations. There was when you wore only your Sunday best to church. This was not some sort of special “church” thing, however. In the culture in general dressing up was simply expected of people in certain positions and when doing certain things. The church did not demand this. If anything, the church was reflecting the culture around it.
The culture has changed.
Now pastors wear blue jeans and everyone is free to come as they like to worship. Some folks still dress up. It makes them feel like they are going to church and respecting God. Others come in T-shirts and sandals. Again, though, this is less about the church than it is the culture. Dress codes in the wider culture have changed. The church is reflecting that. We might make theological arguments about why the old ways or the new ways are better, but this is window dressing.
And, I see nothing wrong with it. The church, to paraphrase H. Richard Neibuhr, exists in a space between Christ and the culture. If the culture’s practices do not call into question the church’s confession that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, then no harm is done to Christ or the church by changing with the tides – or geography.
As far as I can see, dress codes for worship are a culture thing, not a Jesus Christ thing.
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
This love we believe to be the medicine of life, the never-failing remedy for all the evils of a disordered world, for all the miseries and vices of men. Wherever this is, there are virtue and happiness going hand in hand. There is humbleness of mind, gentleness, long-suffering, the whole image of God; and at the same time a peace that passeth all understanding, and joy unspeakable and full of glory.
A culture thing? Probably. But I think it has more to do with how we view the Holy than it does our dress styles. In a narcissistic trending culture people don’t easily or willingly accept that a transcendent being could be holy, with all that that means, and that they could be in need of this holiness. In some churches parishoners bow their heads at mention of Christ’s name, they kneel in prayer and supplication, and bow before an altar before entering a pew. All of these things are done in recognition of the fact that the Church, meaning the church building and altar, are holy places and things that should not be descrated, indeed, should be given the respect due to a god, the living God. Hawaiian shirts and blue jeans might be proper if one is talking about God, style of clothing wouldn’t seem to matter in that case, but they don’t seem very respectful if you are worshiping a God who is present. Priests all wear boring black because they are not the story or the message, they are anonymous representatives and representations of Christ. Our culture tends to see this whole display as antiquated or worse and I suspect it’s because people cannot or will not conceive of a holy One greater than themselves.
Do you think people were more reverent toward the Holy in 1955 than they are today?
Allow me to make a more constructive response.
I think the issue is the attitude and understanding of the people, and a failure to appreciate the Holy is a great failure. However, I don’t think there is a simple equation between one set of outward behaviors and clothing styles and an inner reverence for the Holy. You can go through the motions and wear the right vestments and have no true respect for the presence of God. You can wear the wrong clothes and be casual in your customs and have a deep respect. And vice versa.
For all that, I have no problem whatsoever with congregations and whole traditions that go for high liturgy. This is not meant as a critique of that. I do want to critique the notion that the cultural Christianity of 50 or 60 years ago is somehow more Christian than the cultural Christianity of today.
Of course, what would be ideal is true and real Christianity as set against “cultural” Christianity. I just don’t think we are likely to get that on a large scale. The world is too much with us.
I serve a rural congregation where on most Sunday’s there are more people wearing jeans and casual clothing than suits and I can guarantee that there is a high reverence for the Holy in this congregation. As the pastor, I will be in a robe most Sundays. During the summer because of the heat, even I am in khakis and a polo shirt for practical reasons – our A/C is straining under the load.
The whole idea that dress equates to respect of the Holy is ludicrous at best and heavily Pharisaical at worst.
This is an honest question, and incidentally, it would further the conversation if you would stop implying that I’m something like a modern Pharisee. The question is, why do you wear a robe? I grew up in a Baptist church and our minister always wore a suit and tie. He did this because the professionals in the pews dressed that way. Our church believed that wearing a robe smaked of papist thinking. I no longer think like that but I’m still not sure why churches which are not strongly liturgical (I assume yours isn’t) expect clergy to be robed.
Amen! Also lets think about what people looked like and dressed in Jesus day. Sometimes I wonder if a poor dirty person would show up for service if we would hug them like we hug others? I hope I would. Would we know Jesus if he wore a suit or by the nail prints in his hands and feet? Good post.
Interesting thoughts, but they miss my point. It must not have been stated clearly. Let me try again.
Suppose you were called to an office or a building in order to meet God for a discussion. What would you wear? Jeans? A tee-shirt with funny pictures on it? Would you comb your hair? And then when you left suppose you were to bring a message from God to the people. Wouldn’t you strive to look credible as a messenger from the Holy of Holies without simultaneously upstaging the message?
I’ve noticed that many people dress better when they go see their doctor or accountant than when they go to church. Why is this? I think it’s because they see the professional person as higher or more powerful than themselves, they don’t have this same sense about what is going on during a church service. God is not a being that exists to them, He is more like an idea or thought.
I wonder how we would test your hypothesis at the end of the last paragraph.
I think it would be a pretty easy hypothesis to evaluate if one were at the university and had those resources available. Sounds like a correlational study.
But as a thought experiment: consider how people dress when they are on a tour of the White House as opposed to when they are going to meet the President. Those on the tour don’t really expect to encounter him, whereas those who are going to meet him are fully assured that he is there and present. I’m pretty sure there are more suits in the crowd in the presidential receiving line, but no one thinks of them as Pharisees.
The difference between meeting important human beings like ourselves and meeting God is that God doesn’t give a rip about how we’re dressed. We put on an outer shell of clothing to communicate to other human beings what we want them to think we are inside. But God’s not gonna be fooled by that nonsense. People wear nice clothes to impress other church folk.
Anything less (more?) than naked is probably pretty ridiculous to God, anyway.
This debate reminds me of the argument that Paul is trying to settle between the Jews and Gentiles in the church in Rome (Ch14) who are bickering with one another over Sabbath, worship, fasting, abstaining.
I’m sure if skinny jeans were in fashion in first century Rome, clothing would have been thrown into the argument, as well.
There was a sense of fashion in Rome, it just didn’t become a topic of this conversation because everyone knew the proper way to dress when dealing with the Holy.
You’re just messing with me, right?
I can’t tell; sarcasm tags aren’t enabled in wordpress.
@Kurt – Frank and I have had conversation off this blog. He is not messing with you. He believes that approaching the Holy is quite serious business and how we dress and act in its presence tells us something about how we view it.
I believe what you say about Frank, John, but honestly, his position feels to either be trolling or some brand of New Law. To be really honest, I feel judged by his assertions and unjustly so. I would not feel comfortable worshiping next to Frank if I knew he thought less of my respect of God based on my clothing choice. The whole argument is truly repugnant to me. Maybe I’m not reading his argument correctly.
I really don’t understand why the issue of one’s dress is no different than Paul’s appeal that the way we honor God is up to each of our own consciences. What I wear I wear to honor God. But don’t you dare tell me that I’m not doing it right if I’m not wearing a suit and tie.
I thought wrangling over who fears the Holy the “right way” (and making a show of it) was one of the things Jesus came to get rid of.
…but
this could be the main point of departure. Frank wrote, “In some churches parishioners bow their heads at mention of Christ’s name, they kneel in prayer and supplication, and bow before an altar before entering a pew. All of these things are done in recognition of the fact that the Church, meaning the church building and altar, are holy places and things that should not be desecrated, indeed, should be given the respect due to a god, the living God.”
Maybe I’ve read a bit too much Quaker theology, but…certain places aren’t holy more holy than others. Or rather, all places are holy. If God is truly a present God through the Holy Spirit, wherever we go, and whatever we do should respect the holiness of creation made so by God’s omnipresence. The very ground we walk on is holy, so remove your shoes.
Therefore, I assert that Frank’s argument of dressing to honor the Holy applies everywhere and all the time to all people and not only to church leaders in a church building during communal worship.
Or again, I could be reading Frank’s argument incorrectly.
Have you followed Tim Steven’s recent blog posts on the appearance of worship leaders? Touched quite a nerve.
http://www.leadingsmart.com/2011/08/dear-worship-leader.html
http://www.leadingsmart.com/2011/08/man-looks-at-the-outward-appearance.html
I had not seen those. Thank you, Larry.
I read Tim’s posts, Larry.
What jumps out at me given the exchange with Frank here is how much Tim is basing his comments on subjective audience reactions to worship leaders and the worship experience. He is saying inappropriate dress distracts.
Frank, on the other hand, is placing the focus on what dress says about our relationship with or attitude toward the Holy. Now, someone disrespecting the Holy could cause a distraction, but I do see Frank and Tim reacting to different things.
Hi Kurt. I’m not judging you and you would be welcome to worship next to me no matter how you chose to dress. I’m sure I would be welcome to worship with you as well. I think you hit the nail on the head with the observation that we’re coming to this issue from different faith traditions and beliefs and that makes the difference. I believe, for example, that some places are, as you say, more holy than others and therefore deserve a different approach and attitude. (To be precise, I believe that some places are holy and others are not.) The altar and sanctuary are examples of such places. I attend a church in Florida where at certain times of the year the priest will display the eucharistic elements in a monstrance on the altar and at those times persons are discouraged from even speaking out loud in that area, although a part of the reason is so that those who are worshiping are not disturbed. The other part of the reason is to show respect for the sacrament. This is how we do things and have done things for a long time. I’m mindful of how I dress when I enter those areas because they are special. There are many Christians who don’t view things this way and, I suspect, they are therefore less careful about this. I would argue, in fact, and I’m not trying to get things going again, but it seems to me that the less mindful one is of the holy the more likely he is to be influenced by cultural and social factors when attending church. That’s the argument I’ve been trying to make. It’s not a condemnation, just a hypothesis masking as an observation. May not be right, I don’t know.
Thanks for clarifying Frank.
I think Paul’s teaching regarding one’s conscience in how to honor the Lord can be (and in fact should be) extended to the communal conscience. If I were to worship with you in your context, I would do likely conform to the culture of your worshiping community. Maybe.
When one is in covenant with others in a worshipping community, I think it is appropriate to decide as a community by which norms you will do life together in Christ. The more intimate that covenant, the stronger one’s obligation is to live accordingly. You and I are in covenant together as Christians, but we are not in covenant within the same local congregation, political body (Diocese, District, etc.), or Christian tradition/denomination/expression/etc. Our covenant, therefore, is less intimate and it would outside a spirit of the liberty granted to us in Christ for either of us to admonish the other according to the more intimate covenant of our immediate worshiping communities.
An example: When I worship with Roman Catholics, I do not presume to share in the Eucharist because that would be disregarding the covenant under which Roman Catholics do life together in Christ. This is despite the fact that I am in covenant with a community who opens the Table to all who come seeking Christ. When I preside, I invite my Roman Catholic friends and Missouri Synod Lutheran family to the table, knowing that the covent they have made with their worshiping community prevents them from participating. I do not condemn them because of this, because they are honoring the expectations of those with whom they have the most intimate relationships in Christ.
(while in Jerusalem, I dressed accordingly to respect the traditions of the Jewish population while visiting the Western Wall. I covered my head, wore long pants, and when I was done praying at the wall, I faced it as I walked away, as is their tradition. However, I prayed not fro the restoration fo the Temple as they do, but the reconciliation of all things to the father in Christ Jesus by the Holy Spirit through the Church. To pray as the Jews prayed would have been against the Spirit’s witness to my conscience.)
Going back to my “maybe,” my choice of dress in places deemed more holy by other communities would be in accordance to my own conscience (again, to which Paul speaks throughout his epistles). If I were to chose to dress in a way contrary to the norms of another community, it does not necessarily reflect a lack of mindfulness on my part, but would be a reflection of the Holy Spirit’s witness upon my own conscience.
However, I must still contest that the argument that one’s dress is always directly related to one’s mindfulness of the holy is not sound either logically or scripturally, in the New Testament sense.
And when instructed to remove their sandals because they were on Holy ground….?
If I was tending sheep in the mountains and I encountered a burning bush from where God spoke audibly to me, then yes. Yes, I would remove my footwear and any other article of clothing of which I was asked to remove by God.
There are two problems, however, with what you are implying. First, this is a specific instance in which God’s self-revelation occurred in an extraordinary sense. Extraordinary circumstances often demand extraordinary responses. This is not to say that worship or Eucharist is not extraordinary, but its telos is completely different than our modern experiences of God. Second, though this is a pre-Law example of such an act of reverence, it is firmly within the tradition of Ritual Law. Ritual law was about boundaries–defining what was clean and what was unclean. In other words, it was what dictated who was worthy of approaching God, and who was not; it was about how to properly align oneself to make one’s self worthy.
And that’s the crux of the matter. Making oneself capable to approach the Holiness of God is proven–throughout the entire narrative of the Old Testament–to be impossible for humankind. To make matters worse, by the first century the Ritual Law was perverted by the religious leaders of the time to exclude and marginalize already politically weak populations. It was often issues of Ritual Holiness that the Pharisees used to try to entrap Jesus and his disciples. Jesus often criticized the Pharisees about their extravagant dress, through which they lifted themselves up above other Jews. The heart of their argument was this: Those who did not abide by the Ritual Law to its letter (and often beyond the letter) could not approach God because they did not truly understand God’s holiness.
Jesus came to fulfill the law, not abolish it, and thus is true that one who is without holiness cannot see God. However, that comes from being able to approach God in Christ, by the work of the Holy Spirt, regardless of one’s self-generated holiness. The work of the Spirit in us and with us then generates fruit. Holiness is still required, but evidence of that is shown in love for one’s neighbors and toward God. As for one’s clothing, Paul, James, John, and Jesus (or his biographers) do not proscribe clothing requirements (except women wearing head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11). In fact, Paul argues (and I have noted in the above comments) that the ritual law is not binding to the church, and that such minutia is dictated by the Spirit’s witness to the individual conscience.
Frank, I admire your desire to worship God through your outward appearance, and if it brings you closer to God, then I’m not going to appeal to you to stop. However, your arguments are largely inconsistant with a New Testament understanding about holiness. Until you can bring a cogent argument from the teachings of Jesus or the New Testament writers, this will my last word on the subject.
Fascinating link to a Seattle Times story on church attire (some great humor here in how some churches are dealing with the changes).
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2016047824_hoot30.html