Weddings As Church Services

When planning a wedding, I believe wedding couples should decide what they’re going to put their guests through for the service, and if it’s going to be a long service they should find a way to indicate that on their guest list as well. It might be better for some guests to skip a long ceremony and show up at the reception instead. Not that any couple needs to do this, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that the wedding day is for everyone so planning the wedding is a major step in that process. There is an understanding that sometimes a bride or groom wishes to honor their religion by adding elements of their religion to their wedding ceremony. However, I tend to be of the opinion that, though weddings are for the couple getting hitched, there needs to be some consideration for those who are coming to the ceremony. This might seem like a strange comparison, but most weddings are like funerals in that both are normally performed in a church by someone who’s been deemed to be the religious or spiritual leader of that church, or some church elsewhere. The initial purposes are different, of course. Weddings are to join two people as one, whereas funerals are send offs to people who are no longer with us. I have sat through both types of weddings. My own wedding took about 8 minutes, not including the time it took my bride to walk down the short aisle; then again, I didn’t get married in a church. On the flip side, I performed at a wedding once that took 2 1/2 hours. It was a Catholic wedding, and I sang 11 songs. When the bride selected that many songs I was wondering what could be coming, and I got my answer. Not being Catholic, I’m not sure that I would have sat through a 2 1/2 hour ceremony if I hadn’t been performing at it. When it comes to funerals, I’ll often leave if it gets to 90 minutes and seems like it’s going on longer. I did sit through a 90 minute wedding ceremony where the couple each had different religious backgrounds and thus the ceremony took on elements of both religions, but that was a rare exception on my part, since it was friend’s of my wife and not mine. And we had already waited 2 hours for the ceremony to begin because the bride’s family got lost trying to find the church. Where they tend to cross into each other every once in awhile is when the preachers turn the ceremonies into full out church services. This isn’t relegated to one specific religion; it happens with almost any religion, and sometimes it’s meant to be that way. Many times there’s nothing wrong with a little “church” tossed into a ceremony; sometimes, though, it can be overwhelming, especially to those people who don’t believe in the same faith and didn’t know that’s what they were coming for.