The Church Weddings Handbook. Gillian Oliver

for more people to discover church through their wedding and stick with it after the day?

      This book is about growing the Church, numerically and spiritually, through weddings.

      It is a book for clergy. It contains insights for the people who support clergy in their weddings ministry, but it is mainly for clergy, or as we say in the Weddings Project, ‘vicars’.

      Why ‘vicars’? You may not be a vicar. You may be a curate, a rector, a canon, NSM, LOM, SSM, or retired bishop. But if you are an ordained person spotted in or near a parish church then most people in England will call you a vicar. The Weddings Project has tried to see things from the public’s point of view, and that has affected its public vocabulary. This is a book for vicars about growing the Church through weddings and it’s based on the evidence that vicars really matter to the growth of the Church. If applied in seven simple ways, this evidence can increase the strength and depth of congregations everywhere.

      Evidence-based growth

      The Weddings Project is an idea of the Archbishops’ Council, and it’s an idea that grew out of the Church of England Marriage Measure of 2008. The Council has a set of objectives, the first of which is to grow the Church in depth and strength (see http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/structure/archbishopscouncil/objectives.aspx).

      In 2008, when the General Synod initiated a new law to make it easier to marry in church, the Archbishops’ Council came up with an idea to go with it. The idea was to discover what opportunities for church growth still lay in the age-old Anglican weddings ministry.

      In the Weddings Project, the Church of England was doing something it had never done before. It was investing what amounted to a tiny percentage of income from a big ministry area in research and development for mission. From its investment the Archbishops’ Council wanted to see a measurable difference, and it wanted facts to prove it. It wanted to know, for example, how much truth there is in the idea that people only choose church for the look of the building. It wanted to know why couples choose marriage, when living together is what they tend to do first. And the Council wanted to know what it would take to retain more people in the worshipping life of congregations. In other words, it wanted more of them to ‘stick’ after the wedding.

      Over the course of the Weddings Project people have asked why we didn’t branch out, for example into an investigation of other relationship choices, or take a particular interest in the marriage of people with a previous partner still living. Still others wished we had produced a critique of the liturgy or made more marriage-preparation resources. But the Archbishops’ Council gave the team a focus on the changes the Marriage Measure would bring, and a deadline. If any ideas emerged which were intriguing but beyond scope, the team had to put them in a metaphorical fridge while they got on with the main thing. The measurable growth of the Church through weddings is what the work, and this book, is all about.

      So the Weddings Project is a church growth project. And it is an evidence-based project.

      In its quest for evidence, the Archbishops’ team didn’t go where the Church has gone before, like to books in libraries or to clergy conferences or to university professors. The Church of England decided to investigate matters by asking the public first. These were couples interviewed in their homes, or men recorded talking to their mates about love and marriage. They were brides at wedding shows and the general public through phone polling. They were not the only people who were quizzed about what they thought, but they were central. The Church went to them first.

      Through diligent, public-focused enquiry the team demolished some big myths and uncovered good news. And when the Weddings Project team took the fruits of the work around the country, some people asked: ‘Who are the theologians of marriage you have drawn from and where can we buy their books?’

      The theologians of marriage are people like Sarah, Steve, Leanne, Dave and hundreds more. They don’t normally go to church, but they went for a wedding, and they told us what they thought of it. What they said might surprise you and certainly gave something for the big thinkers in the Church to reflect on.

      So this book does not bring you anecdote, supposition or hunch. When it comes to weddings, the Weddings Project has found out the facts.

      Holy insights

      As well as approaching the research task in a markedly different way from before, the Weddings Project team sought new insights from God in prayer. We were led to an icon from the Eastern tradition which shows the banqueting table in Cana and the wedding Jesus went to. Counter to the way things usually go with icons, Christ himself is not central. The couple is. Jesus is painted off to the edge, only recognisable because of the halo the artist has given him. He is near to the servants who are pouring out the miracle. His mother Mary leans against him, whispering in his ear (see http://parishableitems.wordpress.com/category/salvation-history/wedding-of-cana/).

      One or two around the table are startled by the quality of what’s in their glass. The happy couple are delightedly oblivious to what is happening. Our Lord doesn’t take any credit. He didn’t take a bow. He didn’t send a bill. Only the servants know what is really happening.

      This idea, that weddings are a moment to put the couple centre stage and for those of us in the Church to take a lesser place at the edge of the action, led the team to York, and to Archbishop John Sentamu. In commissioning the Weddings team, he approved this way of thinking:

      I want the Weddings Project to be a way of saying to everybody: Come. You’re welcome. Into God’s church, where we are all guests, where we want everybody to come and find out about the love of God in Jesus Christ. That’s what I did as a vicar, that’s what I still continue to do. It is not my church, it’s not vicar X’s church, it’s not parishioners X’s or Y’s church, but the church of Jesus Christ, in which we are his guests, he is the host. And he asks us by our worship, our prayer, our witness, to bring more and more friends to him.

      This sort of idea has its foundation in the work of Bishop John V. Taylor. He wrote of baptism that the Church is guest – not host – at a sacrament instituted and graced by God. And this, of course, has particular resonance in marriage, as in Anglican theology the couple marry each other. They themselves are the ministers of the sacrament and the marriage is effected when they say their vows. It’s their wedding. The Church brings its liturgy, its traditions and the legal direction and declarations. But the Church is not the host. Christ is the host.

      So what does putting a couple centre stage mean? If it means putting their preferences ahead of our own, what are these preferences? And how can we say ‘yes’ to the things that unchurched people prefer while honouring all that’s sacred, orderly and holy?

      Their wedding, their church

      In 1967 my mum was married, aged 23. In 1996 I was married, aged 27. Today’s bride is 30, on average, and she’s getting older (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8039651/Average-age-of-first-time-brides-is-now-30.html).

      And the average age of a Church of England congregation is 62. It would be understandable if the culture and expectations of the gathered congregation are different from the bride and groom’s. But if tensions arise, what should a church’s response be? So the Archbishop’s idea, built on the impulse of Bishop Taylor, became the Weddings Project’s guiding star. When it came to a tie-breaker, we’d always ask this question:

      ‘Whose church is it?’

      Weddings are off

      The context for all this is that the number of marriages is at an all-time low. Not since records began have there been so few weddings in the UK. The slide started, according to government records, in the seventies and for marriage it’s been downhill ever since.

      But weddings in the Church of England have fared much worse. For every three in the 70s, we only have one wedding now. When other venues became available for weddings in 1994, the downward trend continued. Altogether the Church has lost two thirds of its weddings while the overall slump in marriage has only been by about one third. So the Archbishops gave the Weddings Project three tasks:

       To attract more weddings in church.