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Dream Wedding Days

By John Bayes.

High Quality, Low Cost Weddings

Mission Enabler of the East Midlands Baptist Association

In view of the expense involved today in getting 'properly' married, the Revd Dr John Bayes, Honorary Pastor of Calverton Baptist Church, dreams of a time when low cost, high quality weddings could or should become a feature of what any church offers to its locality, so as to maintain both the sanctity and affordability of marriage.

According to my daughter, who is getting married later this year, the average cost of a wedding these days is somewhere around £14,000.

While getting married need not be that expensive, few couples have the stamina either to withstand the commercial pressure of providing the best for their big day, or the emotional pressure from in-laws who want to invite all their own friends for a slap-up do and who want to be neither shown up nor let down. The reason why some (perhaps many) couples remain unmarried, I suspect, is not because their relationships are casual, provisional or uncommitted, but because, with all the other expense of setting up home, they refuse to put themselves thousands of pounds into debt in order to tie the knot. And who can blame them? With the average age of couples getting married rising all the time, it is now generally the couple themselves rather than parents who feel obliged to fund their own wedding. All the more reason to avoid a multi-thousand pound public splash-out with mortgage-effect.

This is not the place to extol the virtues and advantages of marriage as against co-habitation or to cast aspersions on the latter, but it is my concern that a foundational commitment between couples should be signified and celebrated in time and space and community, and an appropriate rite of passage should mark the transition from duality to couple-hood. To be deterred from such by the prospect of a daunting and potentially damaging financial burden seems to me to be a stumbling-block that the church ought at least to offer to remove.

I remember one fraught situation in a previous church where a wedding was called off days before the event because the bride's mother (who was pressurising the couple to get married) wanted this, that and the other expensive feature, but refused, for whatever reason, to chip in financially. Isn't it sad (and nonsensical) for a wedding to involve the kind of debt that then puts pressure on the marriage?

As Mission Enabler of the East Midlands Baptist Association, I've come across several churches who are making high-quality low-cost weddings a specific feature of what they are offering to their localities. Not only can church communities offer preparation and support for young couples, but, in practical terms, they can offer a building for a ceremony, a congregation (or a praying component of it) for the service itself, grounds for photos, and, with years of experience in chapel teas and celebration 'bashes', they can probably provide a catering service as well.

Recently, I arranged a wedding for a young couple who are seriously committed to each other, but really didn't want and couldn't afford all the expensive trappings: not so much the 'solemnization' as the 'Hollywoodisation' or 'Disneyfication' of matrimony. But what they did want was to celebrate their commitment in a special and memorable way and to share it with their friends. So we set it up for them at cost price. With the £30 we charged for the service, I bought them a 'Marriage Bible' and a large candle we used in the Ceremony with I Corinthians 13 printed on it (both available from SPCK). We had the ceremony in church, photos in the church garden around the monkey puzzle tree (no pagan or totemic significance), and then the couple and their friends and my wife and I went round to the local pub for beer and sandwiches. And the couple provided the sandwiches!

My dream therefore, albeit for a relatively minor area of community ministry, is that such wedding arrangements could become very much part of any church's mission to its neighbourhood, customised obviously according to the desires of the couple and the context and 'persona' of the church itself. My guess is that such arrangements are already in operation in many churches and low-cost, high-quality weddings already happen in quiet and unpublicised ways. What I have in mind, of course, is a genuine non-profit-making service, which is also, incidentally, a great way of developing authentic relationships. Most important of all, the church can thus offer a Christian focus for the most important event in a young couple's life. Good dream?

Are you already offering this kind of ministry/service to couples in your area? If so, write and tell us what you do and what level of take-up you receive. Ed.