Worship Clothing

Do your clothes match the text? Do worship team members and pastors dress for spiritual intentionality or personal comfort or statement? It does not take long when surfing church web-sites to see a wide range of clothing styles for pastors and worship leaders; from Robert Schuler’s academic robe and hood to the alb style robe of Salem Covenant in Minneapolis or the black clerical robe of Bethlehem Covenant in Minneapolis to Efrem Smith’s hip-hop classy jeans and sweater combination. Some pastors out in California pride themselves on Hawaiian shirts, shorts and flip-flops while others wear suits and ties. 

The question is not which is best or hippest, but what do the clothes say about what the text is that is being taught/preached? During my Salem years, we wore the linen albs with seasonally colored stoles the proclaimed the textual theme for the season, so my clothes were “given to me.” At one season of my preaching life I only wore a white shirt and tie with my suit-coat. Now I mix up colored shirts, but always wear a tie, though the worship leader and team dress in wide ranges of casualness, which really works here. 

Yesterday the text I preached on was Exodus 32:1-14 and the focus was idolatry. During the course of the sermon I declared something to the effect that idolatry is really a black and white issue, like the black suit and white shirt I was wearing. Several worshipers told me afterward how helpful that was to them to see my clothing reinforcing the sermon. Now that cannot be done every Sunday, but I wonder how many other ways there are to reinforce the word with clothing?