Anyone NOT get approved by their minister?

September 16, 2005 4:30 AM

Wedding Filter: Tell me about your experience meeting with the minister for approval.

Anyone NOT get approved by their minister?

(I posted this on a wedding board, but I'd like to get as many views as possible.) The church we want to get married in will only tentatively schedule our wedding until we meet with one of their ministers for counseling. They seem to be on the stricter side (got my informational packet with all of the rules in it the other day.) My parents are members there (actually, I am too, I just haven't been going there since I moved to college,) but my fiance is not.

Anyone care to share their experience with meeting the minister for counseling? Is it just a general making-sure-you're-not-a-freak kind of thing or do they want you to go into detail about your religion? He is not very religious and was not raised in this denomination (S. Bapt.) so he may not be familiar with the "appropriate" answers. Will they reject us if he isn't a member of any church?

I should mention that while he is not from a very religious background, he is a Christian. He became a Christian & was baptized when he was younger, but he and his family were not highly involved in church. Also, the church were he was baptized does not exist anymore, so there is no way to get that info. However, we have been going to church together (a different one) regularly for a while, but have not joined as members. (We did not want to join anywhere b/c we will be moving to another city.)

We are not living together.

My main concern was that the minister would refuse to marry us because he is not a member of any church. Is this likely?

posted by saucy to religion & philosophy (28 comments total)

Hmm, I don't know. Our wedding plans fell through at the last moment so we ended up going to a church that did not match the denominations of any of our families, and obviously none of us went there. We're both atheists. They didn't ask. It was sort of a 1 hour bull session on the value of marraige, and what role religion could ideally play in that. We sort of just kept the mouths closed and that was that. This was a methodist church, if that makes any difference.
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:00 AM on September 16, 2005

Exactly what's expected varies depending on both the church and the minister, but given the circumstances you describe I would have thought it would have to be unusually strict to refuse. Is there anything that touches this issue in the information pack?

My personal experience would be less helpful, as we were married by her father...
posted by monkey closet at 5:01 AM on September 16, 2005

My father's a vicar, but I'm talking Church of England here, so take the advice with as much salt as your doctor permits.

These sessions aren't in order to weed out the irreligious from the holy flock, they're in order to prepare you for the upcoming commitments. Marriage is supposed to be a once-only offer within the church and they'd much rather you were both convinced that the choice being made was the right one.

In terms of needing to be part of "a church", it's simply required that the couple attend a church in the parish in which they'll be married for something like a month beforehand - this doesn't mean that you both have to accept the Lord as your saviour, it's not for some emergency indoctrination, but it helps to acclimatise people to the church, the ministers, the parishioners, etc. It also helps to confirm that the couple are genuinely interested in a religious service: if the couple strenuously object to attending, the priest may well not be as welcoming, but don't worry too much, because no register will be taken. There is also the legal matter of the Bands of Marriage being read out during the preceding 3 weeks' masses - the couple should be there to witness this because, in theory, someone might stand up and state an objection.

What I'm really saying is this: the church, almost any church, is delighted to be able to marry people. It is one of the reasons they still exist. They would love you to be religious, but the most important thing to them is that you both be prepared and aware of what is happening.

If they do reject you, I'd be surprised, but not so suprised as I would be if the next church down the road refused as well.

Good luck.
posted by NinjaPirate at 5:16 AM on September 16, 2005

There is also the legal matter of the Banns of Marriage being read out during the preceding 3 weeks' masses - the couple should be there to witness this because, in theory, someone might stand up and state an objection.

They still do that? I've never seen this, in England or the US.
posted by Vidiot at 5:22 AM on September 16, 2005

In the UK you can get married CofE or CofW by having the banns called three weeks in a row prior to the ceremony, this avoids having a registrar at the ceremony. It's quite common in these churches.
posted by biffa at 5:33 AM on September 16, 2005

They still do that? I've never seen this, in England or the US.

They still do it. There are actually 4 options for CofE weddings in the UK:

• publication of banns
• common licence
• Archbishop of Canterbury's special licence
• superintendent registrar's certificate

Other denominations are bound by the same rules as civil marriages (although I think the Catholics do banns as well, they just aren't a legal requirement).
posted by monkey closet at 5:36 AM on September 16, 2005

Regarding announcing the Banns, The Church Of My Youth just stuck them in the bulletin.

We met with the pastor of my wife's small, New England, Catholic church before our wedding. It took about an hour. He separated us, so I only know what he talked to me about. Most of it was him writing information about me in a big ol' book. We then talked for a few minutes, he stressed that we should both get HIV tests before the wedding. All in all, very low stress. I didn't feel I had to win his approval.

That reminds me ... we were living together at the time. He put her parent's address for my wife on all the documentation -- he said that was "less paperwork" than putting in writing that we were cohabitating. He also thought it would go smoother with my wife's uncle, the (old-school NYC) priest who would be officiating.
posted by sohcahtoa at 5:44 AM on September 16, 2005

My brother, a Catholic, married an episcopalian girl. When they went to the Catholic priest to get approval he could not promise that he would raise his children Catholic so the priest refused to approve the marriage.

My brother is no longer a Catholic and they were married by an Episcopalian minister.
posted by bondcliff at 5:46 AM on September 16, 2005

saucy - A friend of mine went through a similar experience when she and her atheist fiance were married by a Pentacostal Holiness minister. They were married outdoors, but they still had to go through "counseling" with the minister before the wedding.

First, I don't think you're going to be turned down because your fiance lacks membership in a church. The fact that you are both attending a congregation in good faith should be a sign of your sincerity. Few young adults have joined a church independently of their parents/ families yet.

I don't think your fiance will be interrogated about his religious beliefs. My friend's atheist partner mumbled a few words about "faith," "Jesus," and "Spirit," and nobody questioned him too closely. The minister just needs reassurance that you are marrying for the right reasons -- a deep and abiding love for one another, a lifetime of future committment -- and that you will raise your children "in the spirit of Christ." There won't be a theology quiz at the end.

Finally, despite the fact that my friend was only getting married by a PH minister to make her family happy, and that her fiance is a tried and true atheist, they both found the "counseling" process helpful. I'm sure the value of such sessions varies a great deal from minister to minister, but it was a pleasant surpise to both of them.

I was married by an extremely unconventional Southern Baptist minster, who also identifies himself as Jewish, Taoist, Buddhist and agnostic, so my own experience doesn't corrolate well.
posted by junkbox at 5:54 AM on September 16, 2005

The meeting is likely just an opportunity for the minister to dutifully explain the merits and virtues of marriage AND attempt to get both of you to attend services regularly. Another important part of these pre-marriage sessions is to make sure that both individuals are going through the process willingly.
posted by curlyelk at 5:58 AM on September 16, 2005

We met with the minister who married us (Methodist) maybe a month before the wedding. He was my husband's childhood minister. I don't remember if he asked me about religion or not -- I am not religious, and I was nervous about being asked, so it therefore must not have been very traumatic. Basically, he just wanted to know our story, did we want kids, how was our life now, yadda yadda yadda. It was fine. I think he also wanted to see us interact (sneaky sneaker :) ).

All in all it wasn't traumatic, but we are talking about a Reasonable Methodist (TM). I can imagine that other denominations might be a bit less flexible and cool.
posted by Medieval Maven at 6:14 AM on September 16, 2005

I got married in a very cool mountaintop chapel at 10,000 feet in the Snowy Range in Wyoming. The Chapel belongs to the Episcopal Church in Laramie, Wy. To arrange for the chapel, we had to agree to attend counseling by an Episcopal minister, and to interview with the local minister. The counseling was not our cup of tea, but we mostly kept our mouths shut and nodded mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

I was unavailable to interview with the minister, so the woman who would become my wife went alone. After that interview, the minister refused to marry us. Likely strikes against us were that neither of us attends or had any intention of attending church, we were not planning a family. Also, we have some pretty unorthodox views, to say the least.

At any rate, they let us use the chapel, and it was relatively easy to find a Unitarian minister on short notice, who helped us structure some of the poems we'd selected into coherent vows, and it all worked out famously.
posted by jimfl at 6:18 AM on September 16, 2005

monkey closet: The catholic church I went to as a child used to post Banns in the entrance to the church for about 4 weeks prior to the wedding. As you mention this had no legal force in terms of the validity of the wedding and the registrar would still attend the church for the wedding where s/he was hidden away in a little side chapel to take care of things after the mass.
posted by biffa at 6:26 AM on September 16, 2005

My experience (Episcopalian) was most aggravating. The only good part was that there were supposed to be four sessions, one a week leading up to the wedding, but the priest flaked and forgot, so we only had three. (Episcopalians sometimes strike me as being really into having strict rules that they bend or ignore whenever they please.) These sessions mostly seem to consist of asking what I considered to be very invasive psychobabble questions -- he even labeled us in our particular Myers-Briggs categories after about two minutes. Religion came into the picture when we had to select the three readings for the service. There were three or four standard choices for each reading, but it wasn't enough to just choose one -- we had to explain what the choices meant to us spiritually, on the spot, which often meant making things up, frankly. It was tiresome.

However, it wasn't my impression that any of this was meant to decide whether or not we should be married -- as NinjaPirate said, the point, as I gathered, was to prepare us for marriage instead. Not that these sessions in any way did that, but I think was supposed to be the idea. I would think that if a minister didn't feel he or she could marry you, it would be because of other details that you would have discussed already -- for example, my nephew and his wife had a little trouble finding a minister to marry them: he was Methodist and she was Episcopalian. They wanted to have the wedding outdoors, and Episcopalians won't do that. They were already living together, and the Methodist minister wanted them to cut that out for at least a month before the wedding, which they weren't inclined to do. So, they found somebody on the internet.
posted by JanetLand at 6:31 AM on September 16, 2005

Oh dear. I spelt it "Bands of Marriage" and Vidiot was good enough to subtly misquote me. Spot who's shopping for CDs.
posted by NinjaPirate at 7:03 AM on September 16, 2005

He asked us, "how do you fight". My bride-to-be answered: "I lead with my left." He said, "sounds good to me".
posted by rabbus at 7:07 AM on September 16, 2005

the first minister was my x's uncle, who was a deacon in a pentacostal church ... he was quite insistent about certain dogmas and i was resistent, having my own christian, but differing views ... i guess he couldn't conceive that a person who had been raised in a catholic environment could have sincere belief without converting to a strict church ... he had been catholic and converted to a "real relationship with jesus"

of course, my x, being a "good pentacostal girl" and a niece wasn't questioned much at all ... the discussion also centered on the theological implications of "sympathy for the devil" ... he brought that up, not me ...

he refused to marry us ... the second minister was one of those guys who advertise in the local shopper paper that they do weddings for 75 bucks ... he met us for dinner and inquired if we were serious about it and was quickly satisfied ... and so we were married in a park by a minister of the native american church ...

ironies abound ... her uncle was later to approve of the marriage of her brother ... she turned out to be a bar floozy who slept around and he's in prison for child molestation ... and my x, 5 years into our marriage, became a wiccan ... my beliefs haven't changed

it goes to show you - you can't ever tell ... not even with your relatives ... and i would hope your minister knows that

another note - from everything i've ever heard, catholic priests will not marry a "mixed" couple unless they agree to raise the children in the catholic church ... my mother had to convert and agree to that before she married my father
posted by pyramid termite at 7:34 AM on September 16, 2005

Both of us are Catholic so take that with a grain of salt, but besides planning the wedding details (readings, etc.) it was essentially what you might expect in a secular marriage counsoling session. Discussions on money, fights, kids, future plans, etc. I'd recommend that part of it for any couple.
posted by mmascolino at 7:38 AM on September 16, 2005

why the heck even get married in a church? look at all the bs surrounding that.

i got married at a civil ceremony out in the country and it was a great party.

of course the dumb judge who married us lectured us on divorce during the ceremony and then got piss drunk at the party.

i guess marriage is lose-lose no matter how you do it! ;)
posted by libertaduno at 7:46 AM on September 16, 2005

seconded libertaduno. My wife and I were married in a beuatiful county part by the Justice of the Peace. Total costs: $10 for the park permit for the day, $60 for the marriage liscense (which included the JP), and a couple hundred bucks to rent enough chairs for everybody.

Screw the church. They're nothing but trouble.
posted by cosmicbandito at 7:53 AM on September 16, 2005

another note - from everything i've ever heard, catholic priests will not marry a "mixed" couple unless they agree to raise the children in the catholic church ... my mother had to convert and agree to that before she married my father

Don't think they demand conversion anymore, but the catholic partner will have to promise to raise the kids catholic.
posted by biffa at 8:14 AM on September 16, 2005

My mother was the pastor's secretary at a largish Southern Baptist church for about 11 years, and part of her responsibility was to coordinate the weddings from the church's end. I can't speak for every minister or church, but at our church the only strict requirements for getting married in the church (and 75% of the time the pastor officiated) was 1)someone in the immediate party (bride, her parents, groom, or his parents) had to be a member and 2)no alcohol at the reception, if you were going to have the reception at the church fellowship hall. The rules packet is to help with their end of things - they have a LOT more experience planning for weddings than the brides do, and have seen all kinds of things that can go wrong or make the occasion less than perfect.

Sounds like you should be okay, since you and your family are members. (It wasn't unheard of for people to reserve a wedding date within a week of joining our church - and never show up again after the wedding.) The minister probably will just discuss why you think you are ready to be married, what it means from a spiritual perspective, and basically just get to know you so that he can feel comfortable performing the ceremony. A big long version of what he will say during the ceremony itself.
posted by mbd1mbd1 at 9:01 AM on September 16, 2005

I know a couple that came very very close to not being approved at the church they had been attending for years simply because they had already had sex (only with eachother, and only after becoming engaged).

I will keep my opinion about these matters to myself, but I want to give you a heads-up that, at some churches, they are quite strict.
posted by Eamon at 9:26 AM on September 16, 2005

The church where we got married required a meeting with the minister beforehand; it turned out to be mostly a "get-to-know-you" session so that, when she spoke about us during the homily, it sounded to everyone there that she actually knew us, rather than being a relative stranger.

This was uber-progressive United Church of Christ, however, so YMMV.
posted by ambrosia at 11:14 AM on September 16, 2005

My spouse and I were in an nearly identical situation. We were married by the preacher of a very conservative church and there was no issue whatsoever. During the preacher-meeting you are talking about, he was very nice; and not judgemental at all.

I'd imagine that unless a family member has expressed some reservations about the marriage to the preacher or something, he will not overstep his bounds.
posted by sonofsamiam at 11:42 AM on September 16, 2005

I know of two people who were refused marriage in the Catholic church.

A motorcyle accident had paralyzed the first individual from the waist down. The other person had had a vasectomy.

Both were refused marriage because there was "no possibility" of children. Catholic priests aren't supposed to (knowingly) perform a marriage if the couple will definitely not have any children.

This means that a lot of Catholics start their marriage off by lying to their priests about the possibility of children, which creates a wonderful foundation of religious guilt upon which to build their life together.
posted by Crosius at 3:24 PM on September 16, 2005

I've been married three times. Thus I've been through this a bit. There's lots of good advice and opinions given above. So I won't address the usual stuff. But one side of this is missing. Yours.

I'm an atheist. All of my wives have insisted on a religious ceremony. So of course we've had to go through the "counseling". Part of this is some discussion to confirm that of course I believe in God and Jesus etc. Which I do not. And I'm very forward about that.

But given the choice to back out of the wedding or lie about my beliefs, my ex-wives always suggested I lie. Which I did.

And I've always been angry about that. Giving vows and promises based on a lie is messed up. Please make sure your fiance isn't going to make wedding vows based on something he doesn't believe. It always ate at me that my wedding vows contained gratuitous lies, and everyone in the room knew it.

On my third marriage I made sure there was no hint that I believed in ridiculous Santa-like deities. I'm very happy about that. I know your case isn't like that, but I'm just saying. Make sure your wedding vows accurately reflect what you truly believe.
posted by y6y6y6 at 3:29 PM on September 16, 2005

I knew a couple who were of different faiths- Jewish and Episcopal- who wanted a rabbi to marry them. They had a hell of a time finding one willing to do it, even though they lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, which you'd think would be pretty liberal. They ended up flying a rabbi from Los Angeles up, who turned out to be a really cool person overall, not just on this front.

Then, of course, the Episcopalian church said that those vows didn't count, so they did another, very small wedding in the Episcopal church.

Hell of a hassle, but after all that, boy, they were married!
posted by small_ruminant at 12:05 AM on September 17, 2005