An online video promoting church weddings is launched today on the Church of England website, to meet an increase in demand for information on church weddings. Featuring vicars enthusiastic about weddings, couples who have rated their church weddings extremely highly, and the Bishop of Hertford, the professionally produced five-minute video explains how the church has a warm wedding welcome for all.
Read it all and take the time to watch the video (slightly under 5 minutes).
The CoE is selling ambiance, and history, and location, and aesthetics, and help, and the key word is ‘sell.’ What is the point of including hymns and bible readings and vows before God in a wedding service for two people who believe none of what they are hearing and saying? It’s nothing but ornamentation – like the white dress and the flowers. There should be one necessary criterion for getting married in a church – that you believe the Gospel proclaimed by that church. All else is mockery and sham.
carl
Carl, I could not agree with you more.
What is the meaning of a website for Christians that electronically locates for them their local church? I don’t think these are Christians by conviction or practice at all.
Now I thought that weekly attendance was the norm for Christians. Apparently not. One couple’s vicar only asked them to attend once a month, and miracle of miracles, they have attended a time or two since. If these are the success stories, the situation is not inspiring, but depressing.
Once while lunching in NY among the city’s Protestant blue bloods and social elites who were admiring aloud the literary utility of the Eucharist as a symbol, Flannery O’Connor, the only Catholic present, replied that if the Eucharist were only a symbol, “then to Hell with it.” The same goes for the Church as cultural heritage, as family tradition, as “appropriate” nuptial backdrop. If it is just a two thousand year old tradition, then to Hell with it!
The Church of England, has a website which enables you to find the parish you are in when parish boundaries are not always clear, and where the local vicar has the ‘cure of souls’ of all within the parish boundaries. There is no entrance exam which carl and Fr. J. might like to have and the Church of England seeks to provide a parish to cover all who wish to be ministered to within the country and so we encourage not only people to be married under God in our churches if they are capable of understanding and honestly assenting to the promises they are making, but in due course to bring their children to be baptised and brought up in our church. All persons married in our churches are required to attend a course before hand with the church and if the vicar is satisfied, he will agree to marry them. It is by no means automatic. It is surprising how contact with the Church during a baptism or funeral will develop into a lifetime of attendance. You may not like how a Christian state church operates, but we do not care.
Btw the Catholic Church in England and Wales also operates a Web-based Find a church facility. Do you have a problem with the Catholic Church Fr. J?
3. Pagentmaster. Of course I have no problem with the Catholic Church’s “Find a Church” website. That there is a an electronic means for finding your parish is a great thing. Those who have recently moved or are traveling must find their parish within days or hours in order to make it to Sunday Mass. The problem is when a church presumes that couples planning to marry in the the church haven’t a clue where it is. It means that the C of E presumes that most of the couples it marries are not practicing Christians.
In the Catholic Church one cannot marry in the Church unless one is a practicing and registered member of a parish. Unless one is, it can be very difficult to get a church wedding. The Catholic Church only intends to marry sacramentally those who take their faith seriously enough to commit to raising their children in the practice of the faith. The best indication of such a commitment is that the couple is already practicing the faith. Hence we have no such campaigns to sell church weddings to those living a pagan lifestyle.
If anything, we strongly discourage couples looking for a churchy backdrop. Odds are that their marriage will not last. Practicing Catholics have a very low divorce rate compared to non-practicing Catholics who divorce at the same rate as the general society.
Fr J. I see – so it is ok if you want to find a church to attend mass, but you can’t find a church if you want to get married? There are rules as to where you can get married in the CofE which have recently been relaxed, although not completely, which is the impetus behind this video and campaign.
I am well aware of the barriers and obstacles the Catholic churches set up to people getting married, including requiring mixed denomination marriages to bring up their children as Roman Catholics. We do not do all that, but encourage people to want to attend and to bring their children up in our church. We do expect people to satisfy us that the promises they make before God are entered into honestly, but we do not require them to prove the state of their relationship with God, but take them at their word.
I am sorry to say I watch the marriages of regular churchgoers [both Anglican and Catholic] falling apart with the same sadness and regularity of those outside, but it may be that solemn promises entered into before God, and the opportunity to be schooled by the church before a marriage, may encourage people not to enter into or abandon their vows lightly. I think that is why so many people find our Holy Trinity Marriage Course so helpful or the pastoral care exercised before their marriages in the Church of England.
Often though I notice that for Roman Catholics, abandonment of their vows also means in their experience abandonment of them by their church, something they and their children never forgive, and not always the most helpful and loving thing when under all the disruption there is often anger, a sense of failure, and the breakdown of all family relationships. But of course it is for you how you wish to conduct yourselves as a church.
Worth remembering also that it is not so long ago in England when people were required to attend and get married in their parish churches! This is the context of the established church and the universal ministry it assumes to all our citizens. As someone said, we are there for the benefit of our non-members.
Practicing Catholics have the lowest divorce rates in the US, along with Lutherans. How can someone take seriously their vows before God, if they do not have a regular practice of their faith?
And, if one is unfaithful to their vows and ends their marriage in divorce and attempts to marry another without benefit of annulment, they may not receive communion in the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church actually takes Jesus at his word:
“whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
Jesus said it. It’s in the Bible. The Church has always taught it. I believe it. Can you?
#7 Fr J
[blockquote]Practicing Catholics have the lowest divorce rates in the US, along with Lutherans. How can someone take seriously their vows before God, if they do not have a regular practice of their faith?[/blockquote]
Well, that is because they get their marriages annulled for almost as many reasons given as are used to get a divorce.
The question is whether you encourage marriage as a good idea, and moreover encourage people to contract their marriages in church, and before God. There are some marriages, where both parties are regular churchgoers from the same denomination but this is not the majority of them. If of course your denomination wishes to be exclusive about who it marries, and set a high bar before you will marry them, that is for you. We however, will continue to minister to those who wish to make their vows before God, in their parish churches subject to our own requirements, as they and their forbears have done.
[blockquote]And, if one is unfaithful to their vows and ends their marriage in divorce and attempts to marry another without benefit of annulment, they may not receive communion in the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church actually takes Jesus at his word:
“whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.â€
Jesus said it. It’s in the Bible. The Church has always taught it. I believe it. Can you?[/blockquote]
I believe that Jesus said it, Fr J, but when an adulteress was brought to him, what He did was to tell her to sin no more!
We pick people up where they are: if they want to get married we encourage them, if they are ignorant we teach them. If they come with the wrong idea of what marrying in the CofE is, we do not send them away, we give them a course and show them what marriage for a Christian is, and if they are prepared to commit to undertaking that and making their promises before God, then we are pleased to marry them and encourage them to come back to that or another church.
I do believe what Jesus says, but I do not believe I should become a Roman Catholic, or adopt RC exclusivity.
I hope we see more people coming to CofE churches, being baptised, married, and in due course buried, and that as they do so they bring their friends, family and children along. These are some of the best occassions we have for evangelism.
I have performed and attended hundreds of weddings. There is nothing more depressing than a faithless couple demonstrating to their faithless friends that “see you dont have to believe in any of this stuff to get married in church.” At those weddings people dont know how to act. They gawk and fidget and look at their watches and just cant wait for the really cool stuff to get started.
Marrying the non believer does not necessarily evangelize them, though it is one way to make some money on the church as prop.
As you ought to know by now, the grounds for annulment have nothing to do with grounds for divorse. They are completely unrelated.
#9 Fr. J.
I can appreciate what you say about ministering at a wedding in those circumstances. There always have been cultural catholics, as there have been cultural Anglicans. Even regular church attendance does not ensure that people have a real appreciation of what they are doing. Much of it can be just cultural, just as people can be baptised and confirmed as a rite of passage.
I can think of one Catholic couple who were not ‘religious’ before that, but both married in their Catholic church having ticked the boxes. Interestingly when their first child was born they started attending church regularly, so it is difficult to be categorical. People sometimes drift in and out of church-going during their lives, and sometimes attending a church event or participating gives the impetus to attend again or to go deeper.
But people gawk and fidget when they are under pressure, and even regular churchgoers find weddings stressful if they have a function to perform. It is also a reaction to something unfamiliar. But it will hopefully be more familiar the next time, and perhaps something they look forward to or seek out.
I think one has to remember the background to the Church of England as an established church. It was predicated on the assumption that this is a Christian country and everyone in it is a Christian and expected to go to church. At one time we made people go to church and indeed there was no alternative to getting married in our churches. At certain times you could be fined or otherwise punished if you did not go to church or wanted to go to another non CofE one.
Those days are perhaps rightly behind us, but the principle remains. The church serves all members of a parish and its vicar has the cure of souls in that parish. We assume that people want to go to their parish church and get married there and we encourage them to do so.
Up until recently, the norm was that you married in the parish where both parties lived or the parish where the bride came from, but there may be a family or personal connection with another parish church which you would not previously have been permitted to be married in. This video explains the loosening of what were quite restrictive rules so that for example you no longer need the permission of both your own parish priest and the priest of the church you wish to be married in to marry in another church.
There are still rules as to who may be married and their personal connection and commitment, and I think the rather flip way this is presented in the video I am not entirely happy with; in particular the implication that you can take vows before God without really believing what you are doing. There is also a course of preparation by the parish priest or perhaps a marriage course which is not brought out. But presumably the aim of the video is to draw people in and the marketing people have decided to accentuate the positive.
But certainly people should go to and marry in their Church of England church, as they have always been able to, and at one time were required to be. We have always assumed that it is the right and privilege of every member of a parish to attend and be married in his/her parish church and in these recent changes we have broadened that parish church availability to include other churches where the couple have a personal or family connection. Thus a couple can be married, not in the concrete box in their new town, but the pretty and popular old church where one party was christened….but wedding tourism is a matter for another thread!
There is a bit more information on the new rules on the CofE website here
Fr. J.
I have looked at the Catholic rules on annulment and am also aware that for the determined, these are not an insuperable barrier to the ending [or perhaps one should say declaration of invalidity] of a marriage, to put it mildly.
As I recall, and this is before the law changed , resident parishioners have a right to be married in their parish church – regardless of their faith. Of course, it stemmed from a time when not only baptism but attendance at church might be legally enforced. The continued existence of such a right always seemed anomalous to me. Just as individuals quite properly exercise individual discretion over whether to be baptized or attend worship, so the COE ought to have rather more discretion over who to marry.
Nevertheless the point that the occasional offices may be powerful evangelistic tools is well made.