The Times observes that people are increasingly separating the legal civil registration of marriage from the celebration, sometimes with a significant period of time in between.
Steve Kneale picks up on this here and argues that it is s good thing and will help The Church get a better and more Biblical view of marriage. Steve’s personal preference is that churches would get out of the marriage game and leave it to the state. He is concerned that we are distracted by offering marriages and that we see these things as evangelistic opportunities when they are not.
Now I agree that there can be a sense when more established churches with beautiful buildings get drawn into a trap of thinking that the wedding service offers an evangelistic opportunity. It doesn’t. However, I think there is a way in which we as churches can see not just weddings but also baby thanksgivings, funerals etc as part of a broader witness. You see, especially away from white middle class contexts, there is a cultural sense that these big life moments are big for the community too, worth marking.
It’s less than I get to smuggle two ways to live into my talk in any of those days and more that we want to say that yes those things are big and that we are present and involved because God is present and involved in those big moments in life.
This brings me on to my main point here. You see, there are countries where you have no choice. The State bit of the wedding, the official certification has to be separate because the State doesn’t recognise the religious ceremony. That throws up its own challenges for those in that situation.
However, generally speaking, the established view has been that you want all elements together at a wedding in the UK. And that, I think best recognises what marriage is. Marriage is about a public recognition of a binding covenant between two people. We would add in that it is God, whether acknowledged or not who joins the couple together.
The important point is that this is publicly witnessed. When churches get involved, they are not acting for, doing the job of the state. They may be acting for doing the job of the community but community and state are not the same thing. The modern state in fact came quite late to the party in terms of its involvement. It’s role is to ensure that the covenant is recognized legally but whilst marriage is about that legal recognition it is about much more.
I think it is because it is much more that people want the celebratory ceremony. After all, they could previously have just gone to the registry office. However, signing a bit of paper didn’t leave them feeling particularly married. They were looking for something more. So, people have had civil ceremonies in hotels and castles. However, there are two issues, first the civil registration tends to be heavily legalistic and put quite the dampener on things. Second, you have a lot of restrictions on what you can include in the civil ceremony.
This is exactly why the separation of the legal bit and the celebration bit isn’t a good thing. It takes. The joyful whole of marriage and divides it up into lesser bits, a contract to sign, some rituals to perform and a bit of a party.
What if it was possible to have something legally recognized and joyfully celebratory at the same time? It seems like we do have something to offer here, something that is part of that more macro level witness, that helps tell a better story about the whole of life.
Faithroots 