Geneva Gown

The Geneva gown is a full black robe with wide sleeves, and it is the academic dress of a university graduate rather than a vestment of any church. That is the whole point of it. The Reformed ministers of Geneva, Zurich and the cities that followed them held that the eucharist is not a sacrifice offered by a priest, and that the man in the pulpit stands there as a called and educated teacher of the word. Wearing the gown of a scholar rather than the alb and chasuble of a sacrificing priest states that position without a word being said.

It is commonly worn with preaching bands, two rectangles of white linen at the throat, which are likewise legal and academic in origin rather than ecclesiastical; the same bands are worn by advocates in several jurisdictions. An academic hood in the colours of the wearer's degree is often added, which underlines the same claim.

From Geneva it passed to the Reformed churches of France, the Netherlands, Scotland and Hungary, to English and American Presbyterians and Congregationalists, and to a great deal of Methodism, and it remains standard in many of those places. In much of the African American church tradition the gown carries a further set of associations, of learning and of dignity claimed in a society that withheld both, which is a history of its own rather than a footnote to the Genevan one.

During the twentieth century coloured stoles in the seasonal liturgical colours became common over the Geneva gown across mainline Protestantism, arriving with the liturgical renewal movement and with a general recovery of the church year in churches that had let it lapse. The change was rarely legislated and rarely debated at the time.

It has been objected to since, and the objection is coherent. The stole is the mark of an ordained minister of the eucharist in the traditions that ordain priests, the gown was adopted precisely to deny that the minister is such a priest, and putting the one over the other reverses part of the original argument in a way that most congregations never notice. The counter-argument, made as often, is that the stole in Protestant use marks ordination and office rather than sacrificing priesthood, and that a symbol may be received without receiving the theology it once carried elsewhere.

The same period saw a partial move in some Lutheran and Reformed congregations back to the alb, generally with a stole, on the ground that a baptismal white garment belongs to the whole church rather than to a priesthood. Between the gown, the alb, the stole and the plain business suit that many congregations now see, Protestant clerical dress is more varied than it has been at any point since the sixteenth century, and each of the options is an argument that somebody made deliberately.