When They Make You Wear a Polo Shirt

Well, DEAR ONES, I could not have said it any better.

This photo and letter came to me with a plea to keep its author anonymous, which is always hard to do because no one likes anonymous criticism. So I will accept responsibility for its content as a co-signer. This is not meant to be a personal attack on any of the lovely people wearing these shirts but a serious critique of what we are doing when we treat church work as a kind of booster club rah-rah event rather than serious and dignified business. Of course we know that we’ll have fun and laugh and feel joyful in the doing of this business — but we should not dress in team gear like campers.

When PeaceBang sees grown men and women clad in matching polos, she is not a happy camper.

I’ll let the original LW speak. First, click on this image to regard the offending garment:

Oh, lord have mercy.
This is the delegation from my synod to our denomination’s churchwide assembly. I will not publicly talk about everything wrong with this because my bishop and several close friends are in this photo.

First off, those tacky, ill-fitting, flattering-on-exactly-no-one lime-green polo shirts. Looking like a bunch of camp counselors instead of men and women privileged to carry out the official business of the church at a national gathering being live-streamed all over the Internet.

So much unfortunate bunching and wrinkling and lumpiness, probably because these are low-quality, promotional-item polo shirts that are made with cheap fabric.

The thing that kills me is, I know how some of these colleagues dress normally. Many are fashionable and well put-together. But it appears the synod decided that instead of dressing themselves like a group of professionals doing important church business, everyone should be matchy-matchy in ugly lime-green polo shirts, a difficult garment to “dress up” in any way.
Uffda. … have you seen similar problems with “group apparel” at large church events?

Yes, Whistle-Blower, I have. And I agree with you.
Those shirts are an invitation to sloppiness, because what are you going to wear with them that isn’t uber-casual?

The mentality is what we need to get after here. I can see assigning matching shirts if the team needs to be easily identifiable to the conferees. I can see assigning matching shirts if the team is chaperoning a group of youth to an amusement park. But other than that, church leaders should be allowed (and even expected) to wear dignified, appropriate attire to important gatherings.

Religion is not a team sport. We should not treat it as such. Save the uniforms for the Little League.