Sep 22, 2010
Church Culture: Suits and Ties or Jeans and Tees?
Posted by Mitch Sliwa in Gospel Identity - Mission | Comments (4)
Did you grow up in a church where it was the norm for men to wear suits and ladies to wear skirts? Was it considered sinful for women to wear pants? Were you told that rock music was sinful and that anything with a drum beat would lead to dancing and that dancing would lead to fornication? Were you told that if you listened to the band Journey you would inevitably end up doing methamphetamines and kill your parents? If so, you grew up in what I would call a fundamentalist church.
What is a Fundamentalism?
Mark Driscoll offers some very helpful information on the subject in the video at the bottom of this post. In it he lists the following points as marks of fundamentalism. The best picture of fundamentalism can be found in the Bible when Jesus speaks to the Pharisees.
- Proud
- Cessationist
- Unloving
- Hypocritical
- Joyless
- Methodolatry
- Powerful
Methodolatry: Why Suits and Ties?
Have you ever wondered why some church’s have a policy about dress code? If you look in the Bible, I assure you that you can search far and wide and you will find no support for dressing up nice to go to a Sunday morning gathering. You will find that Paul tells Timothy that women should dress in modesty and make sure that they are spending more time on their heart than their outside.
Methodolatry is when you take a method that is not in the Bible (Dress style, music style, or even a specific English translation of the Bible) and treat it as if it was in the Bible. You can look in the dictionary for this word but you wont find it because Mark Driscoll made it up. At some point in history, folks in church’s decided it was a good idea to dress up. In Jesus' day, I bet the same clothes he wore on Friday were the very same he wore to synagogue on Saturday. There is a certain belief that people coming to worship God must “give God their best”. It is said that if you went to visit President Obama you would dress up, so if you go to visit God in his house you should dress equally as nice. Here is the problem with this thinking. The Bible. No where in scripture is this idea portrayed. Its simply a method of doing church that got turned into methodolatry at some point.
Dress Nice on the Inside: Removing Idols
The point of coming to a Sunday gathering is not to impress God with how nice we can dress. We come to a Sunday gathering to worship God with his people which involves repenting of sin, taking communion, singing songs to Jesus, hearing the Word read and preached. God is much more concerned with our hearts than he is our clothes. However, your dress could reflect a heart that is making an idol. If you dress up to come to a Sunday gathering it could be to impress people because you have money. Or you could dress in an immodest way to make sure people from the opposite sex will notice you in a way that would lead them from looking at your face to somewhere else. This issue comes down to the heart. When you dress in the morning are you dressing in order to seduce the opposite sex?
The Culture Dictates Dress Code
So should we wear suits and ties or jeans and tees? Yes! The style of church and dress will change depending upon where you are located and who you are reaching. For instance, it would be quite silly to import western clothes, old english hymns from the 1900's and a piano to West Africa or the Peruvian jungles. Why? That is not the cultural norm there and to bring our western dress and culture is simply the sin of American colonialism. We do not need to dominate a culture by forcing them into our 1900's american christian culture. Tim Keller's church is filled with sophisticated upper class manhattanites and they happen to wear suits and ties. They are not doing so because they wish to import 1940's dress code because it is holy but because that is what demographic dresses like every day for work. At Mars Hill Seattle, most folks tend to look more like indie rockers and hipsters because that is what the culture looks like. Is any church more holy or better off due to their style of dress? I submit to you NO.
Posted by Mitch Sliwa in Gospel Identity - Mission
