I read an interesting thought today from an atheist (a person who does not believe in a Supreme GOD) today about dress in the church. What was acceptable and not acceptable and I thought it interesting to hear a "outsider's" view on the subject.
If you ask believers about dress in church you will get everything from; "you must dress to please GOD in your "Sunday Best"", to; "GOD will accept me just as I am in whatever I happen to be wearing". And I do not believe that either of these statements are false. I believe that we do have in certain churches standards of dress that are usually set by the congregation and are relative to the social settings of that particular congregation.
Now to what my atheist friend said. He said that our dress for church many times falls into a catagory that we are trying to impress others than we are individually trying to impress GOD. In layman's terms, he said we were there to be seen, rather than there to see GOD. What an idea. So it got me thinking, what is our motivation in regards to our dress? Are we there to be seen or there to see GOD?
2 comments:
I want to wear nice clothes because I respect God and the place where we worship Him. I guess that is partly my upbringing and partly because of the trend I am seeing toward coming to church in our "everyday clothes" as though worshiping God is not something that is special and deserving of our best. Yet these same people would dress up to say, see the president, or a celebrity and that does not even come close to going before the throne of God in worship. I also find it irritating that the atheist has these opinions yet because they are an atheist, they probably don't go to church, so, how do they know what the motives are of those of us who do? I know I am cranky, sorry....
I was just intriqued by his thought that people dress up to be seen at church. I have never thought that although I would say that I dress accordingly to the congregational level. I know that a lot of people use the "clothes" thing as a reason for not coming to church. I agree that we should not come with total disregard for the house of GOD, but that many times people who wear nice clothes are seen to be more "with it" than those that may appear to be more "hippy" than others. I think it is one of those things where if we lined up people and asked to pick out the church goers, the ones with the nicer clothes would be picked, yet if we had to pick the "believer" we might see a different result.
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