Getting Out of the Wedding Business

weddingAsk most pastors which they’d rather do—a wedding or a funeral—and most will tell you they’d take the funeral every time. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I like to explain it terms of focus. At a funeral, everyone is focused on their own mortality, so their attentiveness to spiritual things is heightened. There is anxiety, but it is a focused, real, tangible anxiety—an anxiousness to hear a word from the Lord.

Weddings, on the other hand, often have a different kind of anxiety—a disproportionally whacko brand of anxiety. It’s amazing to see what people will be wrapped around the axle about as so much pressure is put into a day full of too many expectations. What is supposed to be a joyous occasion often winds up as a Maalox moment, not only for the wedding party but for the pastor, too.

Every pastor has stories about whacked out weddings and I’ve got more than my share. There was the outdoor wedding I officiated where the fog was so thick that you couldn’t see past the first row of guests (I wound up doing play by play). Or the one where I showed up only to discover that the whole wedding party were dressed in 3 Musketeers outfits, puffing on cigarettes and threatening to start a swashbuckling brawl with their fake swords. Or the one where I walked into the rehearsal to find the mother of the bride and male wedding coordinator (think “Franc” from Father of the Bride) screaming at each other and the bride in convulsive tears. Or the couple who insisted on writing their own wedding vows—she wrote two pages, he wrote three sentences, each of which began with, “I will try…” I quoted the eternal words of Yoda to him: “Do or do not, there is no try.”

I’ve had late brides, missing grooms, meddling mothers, passed out bridesmaids…and that’s just the wedding party. I myself have also dropped the rings once and had to crawl on my hands and knees to look for them in the middle of the service. I’ve had to stop a wedding to tell a photographer to sit down because he wasn’t part of the wedding party and therefore shouldn’t be standing between the bride and groom at the altar. And then there was the time I called the groom by the wrong name through half the service (note to self—never do two weddings and a funeral in one day).

Weddings have become such a big business that religion seems to have less and less to do with it. Fewer weddings are being performed in churches in favor of those one-stop wedding “venues” where you can hitched and have your reception in the same place. Indeed, most people look at churches and pastors as simply another possible vendor to support the “big day” and God is treated like that crazy uncle who was almost left off the guest list completely. I remember getting a call at my church in Park City, UT, where the girl on the other end of the line said something like, “I want to do my wedding in your church since I think it’s pretty. But, could you not do all the God stuff with it?” I explained to her in language a consumer can understand that God and the church were a package deal!

Then there’s the signing of the marriage license which, in effect, makes me an agent of the state. In both Colorado and Utah, where I’ve performed the bulk of the weddings I’ve done, there’s a line on the license that says if the officiant doesn’t return the license within 30 days he or she could be subject to being charged with a misdemeanor (In Utah, in fact, I discovered that my name and contact information was listed on the county web site as a wedding officiant–in effect, a county agent. I had not given permission for that, to my knowledge) Given that I have to rely on another government entity, the US Postal Service, to deliver said marriage certificate after the wedding, it’s a bit nerve-wracking. I have had dreams of being locked up as a clergy criminal, or becoming a reverend on the run.

I was intrigued, therefore, to read this interesting essay by Robin Dugall (via Scot McKnight’s blog) suggesting that churches should get out of the marrying business altogether–keeping the legal and religious ceremonies separate and allowing the state to do what it will do while the church focuses only on solemnizing (he uses the term “blessing” but solemnizing actually is more accurate) marriages that fit within that particular church’s or denomination’s theological and moral construct. That keeps the clergy from being agents of the state, which is no small matter. With today’s SCOTUS ruling making gay marriage a civil right in all 50 states I wonder about the possibility of someone eventually attempting  to sue a clergy (currently an agent of the state) for refusing to perform a wedding that is “legal” because the clergy person objects to the wedding on moral grounds or church law. Some legal experts say it probably would never happen, but in this litigious society and hyper-polarized political climate I have to wonder if that could be what’s next.

Think about the difference that could make in the tenor of marriage in the church if you got out of the wedding business: you’d focus on members of the church who are really seeking a Christian ceremony that  to solemnize and bless the marriage and not merely a pretty place to get hitched. You could do the ceremony at any time–maybe even in the regular Sunday service! Imagine the whole congregation surrounding a couple who got married “legally” outside the church but there in Sunday service you acknowledged their union without all the accompanying consumerist junk that doesn’t matter. It would be the church celebrating the marriage covenant and blessing the newly united couple as the Body of Christ. Wouldn’t take any more time than a baptism and would elevate the sanctity of marriage within the church rather than it being a separate thing on a separate day.

After all, I think the church should be in the marriage business, just not so much in the wedding business! We have an obligation and call to strengthen families and promote fidelity in relationships. If we want to really “defend” marriages, then we ought to be focusing on what happens after the wedding, rather than the law about who can get hitched in the courthouse.

With that in mind, the pastors at TLUMC have decided to cease performing legal weddings. Couples who want to be married in the church should get married legally by civil authority and then we can talk about a ceremony of solemnization that fits our theology, Discipline and liturgy. Given that the church wasn’t involved in the wedding business until relatively recently (it wasn’t until the 16th century that the church decreed that weddings be performed in public, by a priest, and before witnesses), this is actually a more historic stance. It allows us to maintain our doctrinal and theological integrity while still being able to bless marriages as “a covenant established by God who created us male and female for each other” (The United Methodist Book of Worship, Service of Christian Marriage I, p. 116).

And, by the way, while we are working on marriages we also ought to be focusing on a more consistent Christian sexual ethic. In this piece, Jerry Walls, one of my former seminary professors, talks about the fact that the church should start really addressing the sexual ethics that are the primary threats to heterosexual marriage. The church has become rabidly focused on homosexuality, while the more credible threat to heterosexual marriage right now is the Christian silence on pre-marital sex and cohabitation. Studies have shown that cohabitation can actually lead to a greater risk of divorce if the couple eventually marries (see this New York Times article for an example). The ubiquitous nature of pre- and extramarital sex in our culture would seem to have a direct connection to our high divorce rate, yet the church remains largely mute on this (when’s the last time you heard a petition about this at General Conference, UMC peeps?). Churches with big glass windows ought to be careful before chucking moralistic stones. 

I think it’s time for the church, especially for those of us in the more evangelical/orthodox tribe, to start taking a good look at what it means to be a church that really does defend marriage by focusing on the people in front of us rather than on court cases and sexual politics. It’s time for us to get out of the wedding business and into a marriage ministry that promotes a holistic, biblical, and kingdom view of sex and marriage. Let the courts and the culture do what they will do. Let the wedding industry make its money at the expense of someone else’s time and integrity. You and me, on the other hand, need to help our people remain hitched, healthy, and happy for a lifetime!

 

 

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