As I prepare for retirement this fall, I am thinking back over my 42 years of ministry. One of the parts of being a parish minister that I have missed in Mid Council work is performing weddings. I enjoy seeing the dresses and flowers and managing the tension. I had also gotten pretty good at putting the fear of God into wedding parties at the rehearsal so that we did not end up with incidents during the wedding. “If anyone in the wedding party shows up drunk or under the influence of drugs tomorrow, I will not perform the wedding.” You could always tell who they thought the offender would have been because they all turned and looked at one person.
Every pastor has funny stories about weddings. Here are a few of mine.
My husband and I were co-pastors of two rural churches when we started out. Churches like this were not air-conditioned in those days. We did a wedding in July. It was the hottest I think I have ever been. After the wedding, I told someone at the reception in the church basement that I needed iced tea intravenously. I turned to my husband and said, “Your shirt doesn’t even look sweaty. Aren’t you hot?” He said, “Touch my shirt.” He was so sweaty that his entire shirt had turned a different shade of blue.
A few years later I was the supply pastor at the United Church of Deep River, Iowa. A couple who owned a bar in the nearby county seat town wanted to get married on Valentine’s Day. Their relatives drove through the snow to get there from Chicago. I don’t think any of them were churchgoing people. As the bride started down the aisle, her brother blurted out an expletive followed by “I forgot my camera.” Then when the bride was trying to light the unity candle, I noticed that she kept trying to light it with the bell end of the candlelighter instead of the wick end. I looked at her more closely, saw that she was kind of weaving around, and realized she was really drunk. (Hence the rules above.) I finally just put my hand over hers and turned it the right way and finished things up quickly.
When I was the interim head of staff at Westminster Church in Cedar Rapids, I had eight weddings in nine weeks. Whew! This was in the days of wedding dresses with big, poofy sleeves and big hairdos with lots of hairspray. The church had a very small chancel area where there were always lots of candles. I never had to do it, but I had a plan if the bride caught on fire. I was going to turn the groom around, whip off his tuxedo jacket, and smother the flames!
But my favorite wedding story is this one. My husband and I were co-pastors at First Church, Burlington, Iowa. We had lots of weird things—like a dog who was part of the wedding party—but this time we had a very nervous groom. At the rehearsal, he asked me how long the service would take. I told him that from the time the bride appeared at the top of the aisle to the end of the service, a guaranteed 20 minutes. The day of the wedding, two little sisters started down the aisle as the flower girls, the older sister leading the way. She was dropping petals just as she had been told to do. Halfway down that long aisle, the littler sister noticed the petals on the floor and said, “Oh, Katie, you are dropping your flowers.” She bent to pick them up. She then looked back up the long aisle and saw flowers all over the place. She turned around and very slowly starting picking them all up. No one was looking at the front of the sanctuary. I stepped down off the chancel and whispered to the groom that I now had no idea how long the whole thing would take.
Those weddings were all in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Wedding customs have changed so rapidly in the last few years that I wonder how much longer pastors will have wedding stories to tell. Many couples are having weddings that are officiated by a friend who received their credentials online. A few years ago my husband and I attended such a wedding. There we sat, two experienced pastors who could have gotten the couple through the ceremony more smoothly than their friend did. The clincher for me was when the officiant—who had not prayed or read scripture or mentioned God—said the couple, “May your marriage be blessed with joy.” I whispered to my husband, “Blessed by whom?”
So many aspects of “normal” church life are changing rapidly. The pandemic has only speeded up those changes. Will churches still see “non-member” weddings as a way to attract new members? Will those who were raised in the church still want to come “home” for this momentous event? We cannot predict that. But what has not changed is what the church is called to do. No matter how our beloved traditions change, we are still called to bring hope in the name of Jesus.
