How To Personalise The Wedding Ceremony

We really want to make our wedding day our own – how much can we personalise the church service?

In a marriage service in the Church of England, what you need to know is that there are some bits that are ‘set’ and there are some bits where there are variations.

Let’s take the ‘set’ bits first.

There has to be a “Preface”, a sort of meandering few paragraphs at the start of the service where the priest lays out what the Church believes marriage is, so that people know what they are here for.

Even here, you have options. You can go all oldie-worldie with the vows as written in 1662, but they feel a bit peculiar these days. You can have the update from the 1980s, or you can have the most recent one, which was laid down about five years ago.

Now you would think that most people go for the most modern one, but in my experience, couples tend to panic when they find out that the Church’s latest preface says that marriage is not just for bringing up kids etc. but is for the joy of ‘sexual union’. Quite what they think they will be doing on their honeymoon I don’t know, but the 1980s version has the softer ‘bodily union’, which is therefore what most people go for.

You also have to have one reading from the Bible, but it can be from anywhere in the Bible, and you can have multiple other readings which you can choose from anywhere: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is used a lot, as is Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, but people can really be innovative here.

The vows are something you really have to keep (the ” for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health” etc.etc) but they are absolutely fantastic, so who’d want anything else?

Here, you can opt for more modern or more traditional language, but they are the same words except for the one infamous exception where “Love, honour and obey” has become for most couples “love and honour”. Brides have to be really keenly traditional to keep “obey” but some choose to.

There has to be an exchange of rings, but this can be one-way: i.e. husbands don’t have to receive a ring themselves, but most do, even if they are reluctant at first.

There then has to be the legal bit, the ‘signing of the register’ and you’ll need at least two witnesses for this: so we note in passing that the minimum at a wedding is five: priest, groom, bride, witness a and witness b. Perhaps that will come up in a pub quiz one day: if so, you’ll be able to wow your friends with your knowledge!

Anyway, there also need to be some prayers, which can be worded absolutely any which way and a final blessing by the priest, for which there are multiple variants.

That’s it, the rest is up to you.

The thing that makes it really personal, I tend to think, is simply the fact that it’s YOU. It’s you and your future wife and your shared family and friends. Even if a service were word for word the same as the one before, it would still be personal, because the people have changed.

But there are other ways of doing it: the music you enter with, the clothes you wear, the readings you choose, the hymns you sing. It goes on.

I guess the thing is most people like a lot of ‘sameness’.

Why do brides wear white? I don’t know. Nobody has to, but they pretty much always do.

Similarly, just because most brides are led down the aisle by their father, she could choose to get Steve Davis to do it, if she wants, or uncle Eric, or Brian from up the road. A father is not theologially compulsory, but then most people want their fathers to do this, and most fathers want to do it.

Again, when I got married, we left the Church to the classic organ tune, I think by Mendelssohn: you know it, daa, daa, da, da, da, daa, dah!, dah, dada, der, der dahhh (pom, pom, pom, pom, pom, pom)…

Now we could have chosen anything: we just fancied that one, because it felt right: we’d probably seen it done that way on a TV soap. Hardly original, and not personal at all in a way, but it felt absolutely fine.

Of course, take your time to think through what you want, and discuss it with the priest. There’s a good gizmo on www.yourchurchwedding.org which helps you do this, but remember, it’ll feel personal, merely because it’s your special day with the people you want there.

Good luck with your preparations and God bless your marriage.

The Reverend Robert Stanier

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