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:
“Let your dress fall down your shoulder,
come touch a copy of you....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Thou, old Adam’s likeness, set to dress this garden.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)