Pastors in jeans and Hawaiian shirts

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.

23 thoughts on “Pastors in jeans and Hawaiian shirts”

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

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