The 'Wedding Industry'

 It's a horrible time to be planning a wedding. Our last one of the year is this Saturday, which thankfully just escapes the latest revision to government guidance on weddings. Still, the couple is on something like Plan Q, having started at Plan A, for how the wedding day will work. They were on tenterhooks yesterday as they tried to work out what Boris was actually saying, and whether it affected them. 

On one of the news channels earlier today, an interviewee spoke about the 'wedding industry', and how difficult lockdown is for this sector. The phrase struck me, and jarred with me too. How is there an 'industry' around a solemn and joyful public declaration of love and faithfulness? I used to do a stall at wedding fairs, fielding inquiries on behalf of the church. Whilst trying to be as polite as I could to my fellow stallholders, several of them were offering  - for several £100s - a service which could be very easily done by a guest, best man, etc. There was something parasitic about the number of ways that money could be extracted from a couple, purely on the basis that they were getting married. 

What's interesting now is that the people who wanted to get married, still want to get married. Legally, all you need is the couple, 2 witnesses and a licensed venue. And those who are getting married are finding that a simpler wedding service can still be just as joyful, special and meaningful, than an all singing all dancing £16,000 blowout (which was the average cost of a UK wedding in 2019). Shed no tears for the 'wedding industry'. If people are really providing a valuable service that's essential to wedded bliss, there'll still be a need for it during, and after covid. If not, you have to wonder if it was ever that important in the first place. 

If covid kicks off a trend towards simpler weddings, that will be a welcome counterweight to the mushrooming expectations that the more money you spend, the more 'perfect' your wedding day will be. The Big Spender route certainly doesn't appear to be a great investment in the quality of your marriage.  To be able to just focus on one another, with a small number of guests, rather than a mammoth organisational task that costs 50% of your annual income with 100 guests to stress over, might just be preferable. And it might even be a better start to the adventure of a lifetime. 

Your Church Wedding: new upgraded website

The excellent Your Church Wedding website from the CofE has just had a reboot, to make it more mobile/tablet-friendly

Nicely put together, readable, the sections look bite-sized rather than essay length, and the visuals are good. Whoever put this together, as well as the new Church of England Christenings site, gets a big well done. A very helpful resource for couples, clergy and local churches.

Flashmob Wedding

This is absolutely brilliant



Full marks to Rev Kate Bottley, for a wedding nobody will ever forget. Full story here. I wish I had the courage to dance with such exuberance, but I'm glad to belong to a church where someone has.

The Weddings Project vs Church Economics

Only last month, the CofE was celebrating the rise in church weddings, on the back of the Weddings Project and the relaxation of rules on where people could get married. We seemed to be getting something right. The CofE has an excellent weddings website, and is starting to identify and spread good practice on how to help couples through the marriage process.

It's lasted less than a month. Yesterday General Synod voted through an increase in wedding fees of 40%, (and of funeral fees by 50%) to £402 from the start of 2013. This was rejected back in July, but adopted this time round. The explanation is that the new fees level include various 'extras' that used to be charged for separately, or in an uneven pattern across parishes. This includes lighting and administration. It costs in use of buildings and clergy time.

Thinking Anglicans has the background papers for the debate. It may make sense financially, but the message that it sends is the exact opposite of the welcome extended by the Weddings project.

Even the idea that it will lead to a rise in income is questionable. If it reduces the number of weddings, we lose both the fees, and the cash collection from the service.

On Monday I met with a couple who wanted to be married in 2013. They asked what the fees were likely to be, and foolishly (?) I replied that there was likely to be a slight increase, but nothing drastic. Now I have to explain to them why the bill has gone up by over £100. It's me, and thousands of other vicars like me, who have to explain this to couples in our parishes. It's not a job I look forward to, and I feel that General Synod has placed me and my colleagues in a very difficult position. But if someone can explain it better to me, then that would help.

PS there are some good things in the measure, such as the abolition of any funeral fee where a child is involved. That makes sense on every level.

Latest Revision to CofE Wedding Service

Hats off to the Liturgical Commission for being so up to date with this one

ht Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Weddings 101

The Weddings Project has 7 top tips for vicars taking weddings this summer:

1. Introduce yourself with a smile
- some people are surprised to find how relaxed and friendly vicars really are.

2. Make those practical 'housekeeping' notices about confetti and phones before the bride comes in
- so the theatre of her arrival starts the service with style.

3. Make them in a permissive, friendly fashion
- how about: "make sure you turn your mobile back on after the service"?

4. Encourage everyone to make themselves at home
- let people know where they are free to move about, let children come forward or stand on a pew for a good view.

5. Practice the promise the guests will make
- some people think they have to whisper in church, but when you rehearse the guests 'we will' before the bride arrives, it really breaks the ice.

6. Have a paparazzi moment
- make sure everyone gets a good angle for photos or video, even if you have to restage the big moment at the end of the service.

7. Help guests keep their promise with prayer
- give a promise and prayer card to every guest. They can keep it by the bed or the kitchen sink and pray every day for the happy couple.

The prayer on the guest card reads: “Dear God, pour out the abundance of your blessing on them. Let their love for each other be a seal upon their hearts and a crown upon their heads. Bless them in their work and in their companionship; awake and asleep, in joy and in sorrow, in life and in death. Amen.”

There's a good page here with all sorts of resources for clergy for weddings, and marriage preparation. The Weddings Project has done some good work in talking to couples, guests and churches about what makes for a 'good wedding', and there's now a card designed specially for wedding guests as a memento of the day, with a prayer for the couple. It's a great idea, similar to the cards we give to godparents after a baptism (perhaps a card for baptism guests is the obvious next step?)

I'm both gratified and bemused by the comments I get after weddings. Gratified because there are some nice ones. Bemused, because people have obviously been to weddings which have been somewhere between uninspiring and an ordeal. We need to raise our game.

Wedding Fair Resources

this from Start the Week:

Wedding shows - resources and advice
As part of the Weddings Project Suzanne Gray in the national Comms office is leading on resourcing wedding shows at every level - national, regional, local. Please pass on news to local church leaders where you are, and also consider getting involved at diocesan or deanery level.

Suzanne writes:

Resources and advice for wedding shows
Wedding shows are a great opportunity for the church to demonstrate that we would love to welcome couples for their wedding, right in the middle of the weddings marketplace. More and more dioceses, deaneries and local churches are taking stands at wedding shows, and when they do they have such fun that they struggle to drag themselves away.

If you are thinking of having a stand at a wedding show, then the Weddings Project team can offer resources and advice to make sure your stand is a success. This includes professionally produced displays to help your stand look good, paper resources gift wrapped in ribbon to give away, and hints about the practicalities of running a stand.

Contact Suzanne Gray: suzanne.gray@c-of-e.org.uk for more information

Having been to the last 4 or so, I passed up the chance to go to the Westlands Wedding Fair in Yeovil last weekend. It's a reasonably well attended show, and there have been a few good conversations. The main business is in giveaways - copies of Nicky & Sila Lee's 'Ready for Marriage', and Celebrations choccies, which go down well with families with twitchy kids and stallholders with blood sugar level issues.

The stall we've run is mainly for information, as well as advertising the benefits of marriage preparation, but I must admit I question whether it's worth the investment of time, energy, and the stallholders fee. Perhaps we've been missing a trick or two, so I'll be interested to see what resources are available.

Has anyone else done a church stall at a wedding fair? What was it like?

Wedding March: Remixed

brilliant way to start a wedding celebration. Ht Bosco Peters, Greg Kandra. I guess anyone who doesn't want to do this at a wedding shouldn't be there in the first place....

The Weddings Project

Last weeks announcement on joint weddings & baptisms (summary of media coverage here - in the main fairly positive) is one of the fruits of The Weddings Project, a piece of research aimed at finding out what people think of church weddings, and how they rate their experiences.

There's more on Paul Bayes' Start the Week site, which summarises the project thus:

This Archbishops' Council initiative aims to increase the number of church weddings and to find ways of encouraging more people to stay in touch with the Christian community after participating in or attending a wedding. The third aim is to increase in the public mind the sense that the church of England is an enthusiastic believer in marriage (about 15 million adults in today's England either don't believe this or don't know).

From a research seminar earlier this year, here are some of the other findings:

- the number of weddings done in Anglican churches has dropped by 2/3 since 1970. 65% of weddings are now civil weddings. 11% are done abroad

- The vast majority of people think marriage is important to society (86% of marrieds, 64% of unmarrieds)

- Marriage is still seen as the best indicator of a committed relationship, ahead of having children together, moving in together, and a joint mortgage

- for men, their main reasons for getting married were to be 'more committed' and to 'complete the relationship', though 17% cited peer pressure. Women cited completing the relationship, and starting a family, though 12% just wanted 'to have a wedding'!

- the main reason for a church wedding is to have a 'proper wedding' (is this people trying to say something about God but not having the words?), and various other spiritual factors are important too.

- many feel nervous in approaching the church, and talk of "the fear the church instills in those who approach it", and that the vicar will "do an ofsted inspection on your life"

- over 90% are positive about their first contact with the vicar, and nearly 100% are happy with the wedding day itself. 78% found their vicar 'inspiring', and more than this rate the vicars words 'very appropriate'. We seem to be doing a good job. One researcher noted "these are the kind of figures Stalin used to get!"

it's also clear that many couples expect the church to keep in touch with them, something we're a bit mixed with. How we do this is another question!

Plenty to chew on, and I look forward to seeing what else the project uncovers.

Fringe Benefits

recent thoughts from Jonathan Gledhill, Bishop of Lichfield, on the church 'fringe':

the Church has a problem too. When people come to us with their spiritual needs and desires we often don’t know what to do with them and sometimes send them away with a flea in their ear. We are quite good at making them feel hypocritical if they want a church wedding or a christening; almost always they want to be serious in making their promises but we don’t quite hear them.

They don’t know how to put their spiritual experiences into our Christian language and so we dismiss their awkward or embarrassed attempts to say what they want.

All the evidence shows that most people are far from hostile to the church; they are just not in a position to respond to an “all or nothing” commitment straight away. Adults who become Christians almost always do it in stages. They need to know Christians they can trust who will accompany them on a journey of faith, marked by several steps of commitment on the way. The man who said, “I’m a regular churchgoer, vicar, I come each Christmas,” was not just being flip. Underneath the joke was a serious desire to have God in his life.

Most parishes work hard at building up a fringe of people who are “not yet Christians.” The parents and toddlers club, the after-school club, the hospitality events, the open days - all these work well in many places...

A vicar from another diocese said to me recently that mission for him was getting the Sunday morning Eucharist right. I know what he means... But in practice, whatever our style or tradition of Sunday service, we have turned in ourselves, concentrated on the detail, and made our “fringe” much smaller because our main services are less accessible.

When Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount he made sure that the crowds were in earshot as well as the committed disciples... If we are going to go on calling ourselves “parish churches” we have a duty to wrestle creatively with this gap we have created and find a way of filling it.

The parish communion movement was not meant to make us into an exclusive sect but in some places that is the unintended consequence. It need not be so.

Comments:
- fully agree with his argument about 'parish churches'. To serve the parish, worship needs to be accessible to those who might try it out. Communion is (unless you're brought up with it) thoroughly bizarre: drinking symbolic blood? Kneeling down for a circular plasticky wafer thing?

- as Gledhill says, for most people Christian commitment takes time. It's useful to have things like Alpha or confirmation courses to offer people, but not to make folks feel they're second class if they don't want to take them up (difficult balancing act).

- there is some interesting research from a thing called The Marriage Project on what couples expect from the church when they come for a wedding, which I'll blog about in a few days, which finds that couples coming to church for a wedding are normally serious about both marriage and spiritual matters, but often don't have the language to articulate this.

Ht Thinking Anglicans