Dressing Up for Church

I admit that I don’t have a real good grasp on who all is reading this blog.  I know that some of you are Christians like I am.  I’m betting that some of you grew up going to church and so you were raised with certain ideas about church.  If that’s the case, I’m about to challenge one of them, and I hope you can take a minute to clear your head and be open-minded about it, because it is not one that people tend to be very understanding of.

My parents are Christians, so I grew up going to church.  Most of the time I dressed up a little bit.  I didn’t always wear a tie, but I didn’t ever wear jeans on Sunday morning.  My father believes that you ought to dress up for church and my mother believed that it wasn’t as important and should be an individual choice, and since I was fortunate enough to grow up in a home where we discussed these kinds of issues, I got to hear both sides of the argument.

Traditionally, it has been expected that when you attend worship service, you dress up.  That starting to change in our culture.  The belief that you ought to dress up for worship services is now being associated only with older Christians, and not the with the younger generation.  This shift is one worth looking into, because my generation has got a lot of things wrong.  There are many people in my generation would rather be entertained than worship God and would rather be comfortable than hear a challenging lesson.  Unfortunately, that has motivated many churches to make their services and their activities more about entertainment because they are afraid of losing the younger generation.  That pushes them farther and farther until many churches now are so unrecognizable, I have little doubt that Jesus would do a few cleansings of churches were He still on the earth.  I don’t want to contribute to the problem.  So I ask the question: should we dress up for church?

Given the fact that so many people older and wiser than me think that you ought to dress up for church, I would think that there is some scriptural basis for it.  Here’s the honest truth: there isn’t.  The only passages I can find on dress one way or the other is like what Paul says in 1 Timothy 2:9: “likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire.” 

The point of 1 Timothy 2:9 in context is that women ought not to dress up in order to draw attention to themselves.  When you read 1 Timothy, you get the impression that the Ephesians (Timothy was at Ephesus) had a big problem with pride, and 1 Timothy 2:9 addresses that.  It gives us an interesting concept, though.  If the Bible says anything about how we ought to dress, it tells us not to dress up! 

The argument that I often hear is that it is a matter of respect.  That you dress up for a funeral, so you ought to dress up for God.  This is a fool’s smokescreen.  We all know that our lives as Christians are to be lived 24/7, not just during services.  So if it really is about respect, why don’t we walk around in suits all of the time?  If we really believe that it is a matter of respect, then doesn’t that mean we are living a double standard?  One measure of respect outside of the building and a greater one inside of the building (where everyone can see us)? 

It is not about respect.  It is about cultural acceptance.  It is not culturally acceptable (generally speaking) to come to a funeral in jeans and a hoodie.  It didn’t used to be culturally acceptable to come to church in jeans and a hoodie either.  Where we have erred is in going to the scripture seeking a way to make a cultural thing that we practice binding on other people.  Is this really any different than the Pharisees, who condemned Jesus’s disciples for breaking the traditions of the elders in Matthew 15?  It is no different.

I am not condemning people who dress up.  If you want to, that’s great.  You should do as your conscience dictates.  I will, however, say this: people often equate dressing casually for church with taking it lightly, as though it is just another part of their life.  I see another interpretation.  After all, if we truly can treat worship service as another part of our lives in that we are serving God so much that worshipping God on Sunday is normal for us since we are serving Him all of the time, is that really such a bad thing?