Head covering is a biblical tradition that has existed in the church since the beginning. For centuries it represented the different callings of Christian men and Christian women. That was the purpose of the tradition. Then, approximately 1950 years later, it went out of fashion.
If you ask most people in churches today why it is no longer practiced, the vast majority will not really be able to tell you. "It was a cultural thing," they'll say, despite the fact that over almost 2000 years the church has existed in many different cultures and places and still kept the custom.
The truth is, of course, it is a cultural thing. Our Western culture hates it. Around the middle of the 20th Century, feminism managed to persuade us that women covering their heads while praying or prophesying was a sign of horrifying oppression. Whether Christian women consciously believed that or not, they gradually just stopped wearing hats and coverings.
But Christian women do believe the feminists now. Just ask your average Western Christian woman if she would wear a head covering.
Biblical commands don't depend on culture.
The problem with all this is that it is a biblical command.
A man ought not to cover his head...a woman ought to have authority [a covering] over her head...
Just because the culture hates a command is not a reason to abandon it.
Thankfully, there is a resurgence of people taking this passage seriously and trying to apply it in their own lives. This resurgence is relatively small and mostly centred in the Northern Hemisphere. And, as with all resurgences, there is confusion and messiness and disagreements among those who have become convinced that 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 is meant by God to apply today. This is to be expected. It should not be discouraging. God works among us in our fumbling to bring about his purposes.
This Website.
Talking about fumbling, this website is an attempt to contribute to the recovery of the head covering tradition, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. We hope to promote resources from Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, South Africa, Papua New Guinea (you can tell we're from Oceania) and encourage a greater uptake of head covering in the church. We're not church leaders, but we take the Bible seriously. As you read here and other places we point to, we hope this helps you think more deeply about this neglected tradition and what God says it means.
Because it's not just about what you do or don't put on our heads. It's about man, woman and the whole human race.