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.
To build public awareness of the Church’s enthusiasm for marriage through proactive media, wedding shows and online.
And to care for couples and guests so well, more of them want to stick with church after the day.
The definition of folly
It is said that only a fool would keep on doing the same thing while expecting a different outcome. So driving up weddings and ‘intention to stick’ would necessarily require some parish-level changes in approach.
The Weddings Project worked in two Church of England areas to test new ideas in real churches. These were in the Diocese of Bradford and the Archdeaconry of Buckingham in Oxford Diocese. These are very different places in ministry context and wedding numbers, and they were home to the team while they researched and piloted and measured and reviewed. The result was a simple system of resources for churches everywhere to make life easier while serving couples better.
If you’re in one of 33 partner dioceses you can use the materials already. If you’re not sure whether your diocese is a partner or not, check www.yourchurchwedding.org/project
Motivation
Some people say the Archbishops must be desperate to go to all this trouble. It was a question that the Project’s researchers kept asking us: What is a church’s ultimate motivation? It’s clear why fizzy drinks companies want to sell measurably more drinks. But why would vicars want to do more weddings? And of course, working with clergy in Bradford and Oxford, and meeting clergy all over the country, it is clear that life is busy enough. What would make vicars block out two days of their time to listen to a team from London sent from the Archbishops to ask them to do more weddings?
Having spanned the country and offered the findings to 3,500 vicars, mainly those who do the most weddings, I think I have seen what it is. It’s a priestly trait. You can find shades of it in the book of Hosea and the Song of Songs. It’s a quality of acutely gentle but persistent yearning for people who are distant from God. It’s like God’s concern for a foreign city, described in the book of Jonah. It’s not bulldozing and it’s not threatening. It’s a wholesome desire to see the best brought out in the people that God made. It’s the most winsome thing about the vicars of England. They are ‘people’ people. They came into ministry to sit on sofas with marrying couples, and pay them the compliment of really listening. If they had ever got diverted from that main thing, if they had ever delegated it, Sarah, Steve, Leanne and Dave were recalling them to it.
Whose church is it? Not ours.
So what is our right motivation? How do we feel about the people who, for a shimmering instant, cross our path? Not a desperation which is without hope, but the sort that longs, with Christ, to grow his Church.
Secular research
Our partners throughout this journey of discovery were commercial – not academic – researchers. They are the sort who usually find things out for governments and industry. They kept the project team honest about what it was finding out. And they kept the findings robust, since the Church was never seen to be the one asking the questions. The Project’s lead researcher, Tamar Kasriel, formerly of the Henley Centre and now of Futureal, is more used to working with the Cabinet Office and Coca Cola. So what was it like to work with the Church of England? She says:
‘It’s been a really fascinating project: it’s quite an unusual organisation. But I think we saw you as something of a dream client. Nothing is done thoughtlessly, there’s nothing haphazard about what you ask and what you want to find out. What marks you out as well is a genuine interest in getting to the answer – there’s a genuine curiosity there. And nothing we found out was wasted. It’s quite rewarding as a researcher to know what you are discovering is going to be used and not going to sit in a cupboard somewhere.’
The findings, hewn from two focused geographical areas, north and south, affluent and austere, have applicability across the whole Church of England and now every diocese has had a chance to receive them. You may be reading this because you were at a Weddings Project presentation in the 75% of dioceses in which the bishop invited us to work. But if you missed it, this book is also for you. It’s designed to record what the Weddings Project learned so that none of it need go to waste, and every church in England can know its secrets.
Moment One: The First Call
A church wedding typically starts some 18 months before the big day itself, when a couple gets in touch about their good news. So let’s shine a light on this first moment of their church wedding experience. The evidence is that this is the most crucial moment for a church to get right, and identifies the best person to be ‘front of house’ in any church at this moment. Who it is could surprise you.
Who’s in touch first, and how do they feel?
How did they know about the church and who to contact?
What one thing means they might never get in touch?
How serious are couples about marriage?
How serious are they about God ?
What does the law require of churches?
It all begins when the phone first rings. Or does it? In research in Bradford and Oxford two thirds of couples contacted the church in the first instance by phone. We do realise that this is changing very fast, and we’ll get to the growing potential of e-contact soon. However, one thing does not change much at all, and that is who makes first contact with the church. It’s the bride. According to our research in two dioceses, nearly 80% of first contacts involve the bride, either on her own (in more than half the cases) or together with her fiancé. It is less common to be approached by the groom alone (12%), a parent (8%) or grandparent (1%).
This evidence caused the Weddings Project to pay particular attention to the bride at these opening moments of
