Which Church Can You Get Married In?

My fiancee really wants to get married in a village church about 50 miles from where we live. We don’t have any relatives who live in the village but we are hoping we will be allowed to use the church. Do you know if there are any guidelines on this?

Firstly, congratulations on your forthcoming marriage! Yes, there are guidelines on this, but I’m afraid they are likely to disappoint your fiancee. I’ll try to explain as briefly as possible.

The Church of England has a ‘parish’ system. For weddings, that means, if you’re the parish priest, you have legal power to marry anyone who lives in your parish, and anyone who lives in your parish has the right to be married in your church, (yes, even if they are Muslim!)

But that legal power stops on the parish boundaries, if you like, so he/she wouldn’t automatically be able to marry people who live outside the parish boundaries.

Now, there are exceptions to this.

The classic one is if you go to church there regularly, but you don’t actually live inside the parish boundary: in this case, you are then put on the “electoral roll” of the parish (with the right to elect churchwardens!) and ‘qualify’ to be married there on that front. In terms of joining, ‘regular’ is usually interpreted as attending at least twice a month for six months.

Recently, (with the Marriage Measure that went through Parliament in 2008), this rule has been extended, as people often wanted to get married in churches with which they had connections, but where they didn’t actually go: so now, if your parent or grandparent goes to the church, that works. Or if your parent or grandparent were baptised or married in the church themselves, that works. And there are a few others like this. These count as ‘qualifying connections’.

What doesn’t count as a ‘qualifying connection’ is just liking the look of the church. Or “It would be convenient for the place you’re holding the reception”.

Now there are arguments about the rights and wrongs of this. Some would say, ‘why not use these churches?’ Others would say, though, that the Church doesn’t just want to be a wedding location, it wants to be somewhere you can make a part of your life, and if it’s in a village fifty miles away, it’s hardly likely that you’ll feel you’ll want to go there even at Christmas, let alone be able to be supported by the parish priest there if your marriage goes into troubled waters. The geography won’t allow it.

So the question the priest at that church would ask is: does your fiancee have any qualifying connections to the church? You could find out more about this at www.yourchurchwedding.org.

If you want to find out which is the parish church you live in, go to www.achurchnearyou.com.

Finally, there are occasional exceptions to all of this, and you can apply for an archbishop’s special licence, which might work. But this would more commonly be used for more dramatic scenarios e.g. one of you, heaven forbid, is seriously ill (e.g. on your deathbed) and you want a Christian marriage but you can’t leave the house. At that point, the Church cuts all the red tape and just lets you do it.

Still, it may be a possibility.

Alternatively, if you’re really dead set on that church, you can go to live there for a couple of weeks, and that gets you through the loophole as you can claim to be ‘living’ in the parish. It’s hardly in the spirit of the rules, but it covers you legally.

Talk to the parish priest there to find out about it, as there may be possibilities, but, to be honest, it sounds unlikely to me. Sorry.

On the plus side, why not get married in your parish church where you actually live? It may not feel as ‘scenic’, but I bet all your friends will thank you for not having to make that tedious drive into the country (which means leaving home, possibly hungover, at 10am on a Saturday morning!) and then have to find a B&B for the night, which means everyone has to fork out £80, just to see you get married.

At least think about it, anyway!

Cheers,

Robert Stanier

Chaplain, Archbishop Tenison’s School, Oval

Youth minister, North Lambeth team and St Anne with All Saints, South Lambeth

“When a person is happy, they become kind.” Jung Chang

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