Of course, that’s only a personal view. Maybe I have no real style to speak of. For all the pomp, ceremony and lavishness of my night out at the Palace, there is still nothing to beat eating potatoes and salt mackerel with bare fingers and downed with a long glass of cold milk.

There has been much said about the queen in recent days, and with good reason. Our monarch has reached a remarkable milestone in her reign; only the second monarch to reach sixty years in our history. It is fitting that we should applaud her and continue to seek God’s blessing for her.

As Moderator (of the Free Church of Scotland) I was privileged to attend Holyrood Palace recently as the guest of the Lord High Commissioner. While he is in that role, the Lord High Commissioner is treated as royalty. He is, after all, the sovereign’s representative to the General Assembly, and his ambassadorial role means that he is afforded all the privileges which would be granted to the queen herself.

So it was a particular honour to have been asked to wait along with the Lord High Commissioner and his wife, along with other religious dignitaries, and be seated close to him at the banquet table. One of his guests was the Archbishop of Canterbury who wore a long black dress, just like my wife.

I would not like to do it often, but as an occasion of dignity and moment, dinner at the Palace was quite enjoyable. There were plenty of posh frocks, and the piping was a magnificent close to the evening celebrations. The food, of course, was magnificent – specialist courses, eaten with specialist cutlery, and downed with a heady mix of specialist wines.

And it was interesting – very interesting indeed – to speak to the mix of clergy who were present. I am not sure if I was the only clergyman not sporting a clerical collar; but if I had any doubts about ditching mine, I had none at all that evening. The more I spoke to the clerically attired gentlemen, the more I realised that the clerical collar and related paraphernalia has become a badge of liberalism, a uniform for yuppie clergymen whose aspirations for climbing the social ladder with the great and the good were everywhere on display that night in the palace.

It’s a phenomenon that intrigues me greatly, because I know that in these Highlands and Islands of ours the clerical collar was anything but a sign of theological liberalism and social climbing. If the cartoonists wished to portray a fundamentalist Free Church minister from Lewis, they would portray him complete with clerical attire and homburg hat. Even the lady seated next to me at the Lord High Commissioner’s banquet commented that she did not expect to see a Free Church minister in such stylish evening attire; which I mention not to highlight how well I can dress up for an occasion, but to demonstrate how long some caricatures take to die.

The sporting of the clerical collar was simply expected for those of us who had the privilege of ministering the Word of God in these islands on the seaboards of Europe, and it was expected because we were conservative, not unorthodox, Calvinists, not socialites, and evangelical, not liberal. The distinctive dress of the clergy when I was licensed to preach was a given within our tradition; and I guess it had some uses.

But, for better or worse, I reached a point in my own ministerial career and personal development where I had to make a choice about continuing the tradition or not, and to ask questions which I probably had not begun to ask before.

For one thing, where was the biblical justification for a distinctive clerical uniform? We seemed to pay lipservice to the idea of the priesthood of all believers, and to the doctrine that the congregation was governed by a plurality of elders, of whom the minister was the full-time teacher. Yet in practice we introduced not only a distinction into the eldership, but a different dress code too. I buy into the twofold office doctrine, but still believe all elders are equal, none is more equal than others, and all should dress the same.

For another thing, where was the Reformed precedent for a distinctive dress uniform? Although some of the Puritans wore distinctive black garments as a symbol of their moral authority, most rejected the idea of clerical vestments with their associations with the ritualism against which they were protesting.

Those who are familiar with Reformation history know that even among the sixteenth century Reformers there was a vestments controversy that divided the leading lights in the movement. Some regarded clerical vestments as indifferent matters, upon which individuals should form their own judgement. Others saw it as an unwarranted return to Old Testament forms, which the New Testament had done away with. But the literature affords me no warrant to think that the sporting of clerical dress is anything other than a priestly ritual that has little to do with biblical evangelicalism.

And for another thing, where was the reason to suppose that what a man wore was any indication of what a man stood for? I shall be judged by my words, according to Scripture, not by my style of dress.

So my clerical collars are in a box somewhere, in the forlorn hope of resurrection. They are little more than a cultural icon, without any scriptural warrant or Reformed precedent. My night at the Palace was the final affirmation I needed that when churchmen dress with a distinctive uniform simply in order to dine with lords, the uniform is no real indication of anything. Indeed, it made me embarrassed that I had ever dressed differently to the people I was called to serve.

Of course, that’s only a personal view. Maybe I have no real style to speak of. For all the pomp, ceremony and lavishness of my night out at the Palace, there is still nothing to beat eating potatoes and salt mackerel with bare fingers and downed with a long glass of cold milk.

Iain Campbell is a native of the Isle of Lewis in northwest Scotland where he serves as pastor of the Free Church of Scotland congregation in Point. He was elected Moderator of the FCS in 2012.  He also serves as Adjunct Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary.  This article first appeared on his blog, Creideamh ((pronounced ‘kray-jif’), Gaelic for ‘Faith’, and is used with his permission