You know, Baptists just don�t have to worry about any of this, but it may be fun to give a quiz in a pastoral leadership class on clergy liturgical vestments. I always enjoyed visiting Virginia Theological Seminary (Episcopal) and watch the student aspiring clergy ordering their vestments along with their graduation regalia. They LOVE this stuff!
Anthropologists used to claim that two elements existed in every culture ever discovered: (1) a religion, and (2) clothing. Sometimes the clothing consisted of a grass belt and nothing else. That�s because the primary function of clothing in culture is not protection from the elements, but rather, it is identification. You can know immediately by sight who someone is in a society by looking at the clothes that person is wearing: they occupy a stratum (rich, poor), a class (ruling, leisure, working), a rank (soldier, clergy, executive, etc.).
Some time ago someone wrote an insightful albeit tongue-in-cheek piece about how you could tell an old-school Southern Baptist and the new-school CBF Baptist. SBC types wore suit, ties, and white shirts. The CBF �uniform� was polo shirt and casual slacks. Those early CBFers may have had a tough time defining their theological and cultural differences from the mother denomination, but it didn�t take them long to use clothing as a form of self-defining identification medium!
When I was in seminary in the �80s it became easy to identify which school a student belonged to. New Testament and biblical studies students always wore white shirts, tie, gold-rimed glasses, and sported gold cross pens in the pockets of their starched shirts (no pocket protectors, of course). Aspiring religious education students wore loud checkered sports coats; and pastoral care and counseling students wore open-collared shirts (white or colored) with rolled up long sleeves and undone ties. Women students at the time wore a de-rigor outfit that communicated modesty, inaccessibility, and chastity. (I�m not making this up). Today, our seminarians are comfortable in jeans, t-shirts, shorts, and baseball caps (and I wish I was making that up!).
Lazlo’s Chinese Relativity Axiom:
“No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats—approximately one billion Chinese couldn’t care less.”
