Why are churches not promoting themselves as the best context to start your marriage? Why are churches not presenting themselves as the ideal place for a wedding?
Last week, newspapers (and their digital equivalents) highlighted that the average New Zealand wedding costs about $32,000. Why are Anglican churches not presenting themselves as a sensible, positive, inexpensive alternative?
I was recently talking to someone who had just returned from a wedding that had cost the couple over $100,000 – and the guests had to pay for lots of stuff on top of that! Why are Anglican parishes – not as a moneymaking venture, but out of care and the missional imperative – not presenting a package which includes marriage preparation, a church service, a catered event in the nearby church hall, and ongoing contact and care as the marriage develops and changes?
So I asked myself: What do churches actually offer? I started at our diocesan website and (I have a maths degree and I’m not afraid to use it) I randomly chose a good number of parishes and ministry units from the list provided. I will not reveal the actual parishes and ministry units to protect the guilty.
About a quarter of the links led to a server-not-found type of message – the website on the Diocesan site didn’t lead to the parish. Some of these parishes did actually have a website, but I found them by an internet search. About a quarter of my random selection had no website that I could find (none given on the diocesan site, or the link didn’t get there, or an internet search didn’t get me to one). While some parishes had some web presence (Facebook, YouTube,…), some parishes had nothing online I could find at all. About a quarter had very flash websites – and nothing that I could find about weddings. Many of the flash sites had no search bar, no way to search for something on the site. Some had nothing I could find about weddings, but they did have a way to search the site, and putting “wedding” in their search bar led to nothing.
Some had their wedding information hidden under a tab with a title like “ministries” (I don’t know if people would know that a wedding was a “ministry). Others had it hidden under a tab with a title like “services” (I guess more people would know that a wedding is a “service” than would know that it is a “ministry”). Rarely, ‘weddings’ was a visible tab or other way that you could see it pretty easily. The question immediately arrises: who is the website for – the in-crowd, the theologically-agile crowd, or an ordinary couple wanting to get married? None of my randomly selected parishes and ministry units mentioned money. Some were quite ambiguous – could you marry in the hall, or was the hall available for weddings for an event following the wedding in church? You know what you mean when you create your website with “ministries” and so on – but you need to ask a person who doesn’t go to your church to find their way around your website.
In 2022, a total of 49 couples got married in our churches in the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch. In total. For the whole year. In our whole diocese. That’s in a post-Covid catch up year! Did your church do anything about it being a post-Covid catch-up year for weddings (and baptisms)?! Four decades ago, 823 couples got married in our churches in the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch in the year.
Yes, marriage isn’t as popular now as then (although some people are getting married more often than ever!) In these 4 decades, wedding numbers have (in round figures) about halved in NZ’s population. So, we should expect about 410 weddings in a year now (we could have more, if more was made of: this is the place to have a wonderful wedding leading into an awesome marriage!). So, again in round numbers, we have lost about 90% of our expected weddings proportion! 49 instead of the expected 410!
Over these four decades, a major focus of the Anglican Church has been debating the nature of marriage – it even split the Church! But does all this bear out the contention of those who claim they think marriage is special and to be encouraged?
Thirteen years ago, I wrote on this site how the church was missing out on getting our message out about relationships and marriage! Fourteen years ago, I wrote on this site advocating for promoting inexpensive church weddings. I wish I wasn’t thinking: I told you so.
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Bosco, you make some very good points there, and I will be looking at my own church website with a new point of view in a minute, and think that I will probably be disappointed by what I find.
Some years ago, the C of E had an initiative for low priced church wedding packages, similar to what you have suggested. I don’t know what happened to it.
Finally, not wishing to be flippant – no, in fact, deliberately being flippant – I wonder how we end up with 49 people being married in a diocese in a year, or indeed 823. If you have a maths degree and aren’t afraid to use it, didn’t you wonder why those weren’t even numbers?
Argggh!!!, Ian – you are quite correct: it was 49 weddings – not 49 people! [That one can now marry oneself, notwithstanding!] Corrected now, thanks! Do let us know how you found things on your website. Blessings.
Well, in fact I was pleasantly surprised. The banner across the top of the site has one tab called “Life events”, which is what any normal person might be looking for. Clicking that gives a choice of Baptisms, Funerals, Weddings (odd order, maybe it’s alphabetical?)
Weddings says a bit about how we can support you and also links to a resource on the C of E site – https://www.churchofengland.org/life-events/your-church-wedding
My recent suggestion that the school chapel of the bride-to-be could be a place of special significance was met with ‘Oh but I want an outdoor wedding’. Perhaps in the grounds of the local parish church ? maybe a graveyard wedding ? No ? Mmmm a review of church property in a given location could well identify an ideal wedding venue to be promoted throughout that diocese.