Why do Seventh-day Adventists wear skirts in worship?
Why do Seventh-day Adventists wear skirts in worship?
Skirts here, of course would refer to anything that is not a pair of pants, inclusive of dresses and other form of clothes worn during worship service. The question that should probably be asked is why don’t Seventh-day Adventist Christians wear pants during worship in many countries. This question has both a historical context and a Biblical context though we might find that history and the Bible may have intersected to create policies and to establish norms.
On the historical front, women from all over the world were already wearing pants for thousands of years except in the west (Europe and the USA). The reason, Christianity’s influence on the west. The text that was at the forefront of this practice was Deuteronomy 22:5 which simply states that women must not wear men’s clothing and the reverse. This movement would not be challenged until the 1850s and interestingly the Seventh-day Adventist church began in the late 1840s in the United States of America and became official in 1863. Seventh-day Adventism was moulded within a social construct where it was unacceptable for women to wear pants. This practice, once discouraging the complete rejection of female pants as legitimate clothing, has in recent times been limited to church worship service. As time passes on, so does history. In many churches today, women could be seen wearing pants, especially because it is more practical in during winter.
In the recent church manual, the word “pants” or “trousers do not appear a single time. The church manual is the official document governing the practices of Seventh-day Adventists. The fact that these words do not appear shows that it is no longer an issue in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Some churches may choose to propagate the culture based on the context of their churches but the Seventh-day Adventist church as a whole does not have an official position regarding women wearing pants.
