Sunday Best

I had a thought yesterday morning as I was sitting in church and I looked around and saw all the different styles represented by the church body: why does the church traditionally put pressure on wearing "Sunday best?" My church is rather casual. Not sloppy, everyone looks presentable but jeans are a very common factor. My church is also in Eagle Rock which is a neighborhood of LA. I don't think I ever would have had these thoughts except that there are so many homeless people in LA. Part of our mission as the body of Christ is to reach the "least of these." But, I wonder, how can we do that when on Sundays as we gather and try to invite those people in we're always dressing as the "best of these?" I know, for myself, if I had only two shirts and one pair of pants I hadn't been able to clean for weeks I wouldn't want to enter into a community where everyone was in business dress. I would stick out like a very dirty, sore thumb!
Now, this isn't to be condemning of churches that do dress up and it's not to say that we shouldn't care about our appearance and go to church looking sloppy. But I do wonder, who are we trying to impress? Why do we need to trot out our best clothes and look perfectly groomed when we're trying to reach the people who can't afford a hairbrush and we're all just broken people anyway? We want to create a community that is open and welcoming to both the wealthy and the unshowered; the put together and the chronically depressed; the nuclear family and the harried single mother. How much stress would it relieve from that single mother if her kids could be in whatever they decided that day's fashion was and not children's business casual? How much more willing would she be to go and be welcomed into a church family that didn't judge on outward appearance?
By wearing our best, we create (consciously or not) a socioeconomic divide between the classes. I am not condemning a person's desire to wear cashmere or silk to church. If you have it, and you want to wear it to church, then go for it! I think church should be a beautiful patchwork of all the colors and classes that make up this broken mess we call humanity.