Dress
In North America and Europe, up until the late 1950s it was often expected that worshippers wore their best clothes to church services (known colloquially as the Sunday best). This tradition has declined in many mainstream churches but is still much in evidence in the Southern Baptist and Mormon traditions in the U.S., and in many black evangelical churches.
Those who support more relaxed dress codes do so on the basis that congregants should come to God as they are, and that communion with God requires no special clothing. Those who support more formal dress consider that although communion with God does indeed not require special clothing, a church service is an office of devotion and as a matter of respect, it is therefore appropriate to wear one's best attire.
Even where dress code is more relaxed it is still generally considered proper to dress modestly.
Read more about this topic: Church Etiquette
Famous quotes containing the word dress:
“If we confine ourselves to one life role, no matter how pleasant it seems at first, we starve emotionally and psychologically. We need a change and balance in our daily lives. We need sometimes to dress up and sometimes to lie around in torn jeans. . . . Even a grimy factory can afford some relief from a grimy kitchen and vice versa.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)
“Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.”
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (b.1941)
“Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest “swell,” but he simply cannot buy the right things.”
—William James (1842–1910)