Hello, Goodbye: Why I Didn't Wear 'Clergy Attire' at Friendship

As I mentioned in the previous post in this series, a member of Friendship Church asked when I stopped wearing clerical collars, albs, and such here and whether I would resume wearing them when I begin my work as pastor at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio.

The move away from traditional attire at Friendship was a gradual process, some of it deliberate and some of it purely accidental.

It had its roots in the door-to-door visits I conducted from October, 1990 to May, 1991. door-to-door visitation was a successful mode of starting new churches back in the post-World War Two-era. The former bishop of our Southern Ohio Synod, Ken Sauer, started a congregation in Akron.1 The late Jerry Fallwell, some will know, also used this method in the 1950s to start and develop his famous fundamentalist congregation, Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. This was still the proscribed approach in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), of which I'm a part, in 1990, even by that time, there was ample evidence that this was a relatively ineffective method for church planting in US suburbs. But being a good soldier in those days, I began knocking at doors and ringing doorbells.

What happened surprised me. I knew that the data showed that, counting all households on which I called, including those whose residents were away at the time I stopped by, I could expect about one of every twenty to express some interest in this newly forming congregation. But as I met with people, only one in sixty were telling me to send them more information about Friendship.

This troubling trend had gone on for about a month when I went to Cleveland for a presentation on how to develop worship services that are compelling to the spiritually disconnected. The mission director for our synod, the supervisor of my work as pastor-developer, was also there. During a break in the daylong session, I told Bob about my experience and sought some explanation.

Bob, it should be said, was a lifelong Lutheran, then in his sixties, precisely the sort of fellow you might expect to be a guardian of the usual ways of doing things. "What are you wearing when you go to door-to-door?" he asked me. I was wearing the same thing I'd worn every day of my work life as a pastor. "My clerical collar," I told him. Bob said, without missing a beat, "Lose it."

Bob understood the demographics of our area. He also had a firm grasp on the aim of any new mission church, which is to attract what are called "the unchurched," people who had either never been involved with Christ and the Church or who hadn't been active in a congregation for at least five years.

Metropolitan Cincinnati has a strong Roman Catholic presence. Most Catholics in the area are happily engaged in the life of their church and we had no designs on stealing Christians from our churches. But, in an area that is as strongly Roman Catholic as this Tristate area, there were and are also high numbers of "lapsed Catholics," some of whom are disgruntled with the Catholic Church.

Another large portion of the unchurched population of Clermont County, where I planted Friendship, was and is made up of people with conservative evangelical backgrounds.

To the first group, a guy in a clerical collar would seem to be "more of the same" they weren't interested in seeing. For the second, a clerical collar would represent a mysterious, impenetrable religion.

Either way, my clerical collar was getting in the way of doing what I was trying to do: Invite people who had no connection to a church to consider my invitation to consider being part of Friendship.

Armed with Bob's blunt advice to "lose" my clerical collar, I hit the streets of this community once more. Suddenly, one out of every nineteen households was expressing interest in this new church.

Still, when we began worshiping at Friendship on May 19, 1991, there I was in traditional Lutheran clergy attire. Then, on the second Sunday we worshiped in the stuffy gymnasium of the Withamsville-Tobasco Elementary School, I prepared to put on my robe. One of the founding members of the church, Roger, a lifelong Lutheran, said, "Mark, it's too hot for that."

I tended to wear traditional attire on only special occasions after that. It was a case of practicality meeting good Lutheran theology and a commitment to both hospitality and loving outreach.

Since 1517, part of the Lutheran "project" has been to tear down the impediments to knowing and enjoying God erected by the institutionalized church. Built on the essential proclamation of the Christian faith that God declares sinners acceptable for eternity by virtue of their belief in Jesus Christ, the founder of the evangelical movement, Martin Luther, reformed the Mass (translating worship into the language of the people from the Latin); offering both elements of the Sacrament of Holy Communion; translated the Bible into German; composed hymns in the musical styles and language of the people; and wrote The Small Catechism to familarize families with the basics of Christian faith, among other things. In the centuries since, though it has often been overlooked by Lutherans, there has been an amazing and rich diversity of worship styles, musical expressions, and "proscribed attire" for clergy. That diversity still exists in the worldwide Lutheran movement.

That makes sense. Luther himself often railed against the Church's tendency to get hung up on what he called "adiaphora," basically meaning things that aren't essential to faith, salvation, worship, or church practice. The theologians who joined and followed Luther's lead in the Reformation agreed with him. The Augsburg Confession, a basic confessional document of the Lutheran movement written by other evangelical theologians during Luther's lifetime, describes the Church:

The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.

And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Nor is it necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies, instituted by men, should be everywhere alike. As Paul says: One faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, etc. Eph. 4, 5. 6.

The point: Outward attire is just that, outward attire. Those in the Church should never confuse sociology for theology, the unimportant for the essential.

I personally was comfortable with clerical collars, albs, stoles, and such. But I had to ask myself some important questions:

• In trying to develop a new congregation built on sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ with the spiritually disconnected, was I willing to leave my personal comfort zone?
• Was I Lutheran enough to major in the majors and leave the adiaphora behind?
• Was I Christian enough to tear down the impediments that might keep the unchurched from seeing Jesus?
  

When it came to my attire, I also had to ask myself another question: What would Jesus do? How would He appear to these people on a Sunday morning?

In first-century Judea, Jesus wore the common robe worn by others. His attire hadn't stood out from the crowd any more than had the first priests to don clerical collars back in the days of the Roman Empire. I adopted a kind of "casual Friday" look that helped many people to connect with me and with the Lord I tried to faithfully present.

Making Christ known must remain the preeminent goal of the Christian Church and of Lutherans. (Please read here.) God knows that not every one of my choices as pastor of Friendship Lutheran Church these past seventeen years has been right. But at least for the period 1991-2007, my choice in attire, irrespective of how unimportant that issue is in the grand scheme of things, was the right one and I feel, it helped Friendship make Christ known.

As I head for a new congregation though, I'll be going back to traditional Lutheran attire. In the next installment of this series, I'll try to explain why I think that is the right choice.

1And, in that period when people were hungry for church involvement, Sauer once told me, a pastor developing a new congregation might not have even needed the door-to-door visitation to get things going. "I had it a lot easier than you do now," he said. "In those days, it seemed all you had to do was put up a sign announcing that a new church was coming and you had a crowd."