I guess my wife and I were something of trailblazers. When we decided to get married over 20 years ago, we had two ideas: I wanted a small wedding, and she wanted to get married on the beach. So we decided to go to Myrtle Beach and invited only her parents and mine; my brother, who lives a few hours from there, decided to invite himself as well. We had a nice simple wedding on the beach done by an old guy we found online, went out as a family for dinner, and started our honeymoon.
When I first began in ministry over 30 years ago, most people still got married at a church. Part of my job was occasionally meeting people that had no connection to the churches at which I ministered and finding time to do a brief bit of premarital counseling before walking them through the sanctuary and fellowship hall and letting them plan their big to-do. Often times I would never hear from them again after the wedding, but I wished them well and hoped that in at least some tiny way the need for Christ and the church would have rubbed off on them.
I got to thinking about this recently, as the daughter of a cousin of mine got married last weekend at a venue not far from here. Even as these were people who were raised in church, I don't get the impression that getting married at a church building crossed their mind. Instead, they chose one of the many venues that are found in the city and countryside these days...often a barn with a pretty view, a banquet hall with plenty of room for a dance floor, perhaps even an old church building that has been repurposed for weddings. When was the last time I went to an actual church wedding? It's gotta be over a decade, I think.
In some ways I don't feel too bad about this...administration and wedding plans have always been the two things I have enjoyed the least about ministry. Starting about 10 years ago, I made the conscious decision to try and avoid doing weddings for anybody I didn't know...but now it's been years since I've even been asked. Many of the times I officiated at weddings I always felt I had the same value in the eyes of the couple as a color scheme or the right kind of flowers in the reception hall.
Yet watching the change over these years has also brought me some sorrow, this idea that people in our country have bypassed churches, even God, in their weddings. While I am glad that people are still deciding to get married (as long as I don't have to do it!) rather than simply live together, this diminishing of religion in one of the most sacred moments of a person's life speaks volumes about the real place of Christianity in America. There's a line in the wedding vows in which a person makes a commitment to their spouse 'before God and before these witnesses' that now is no longer necessary, at least in part.
As much as I have never cared to do weddings, I have always felt more at home in funerals. Funerals actually allowed me to do my job of ministry, serving and blessing families in some of the most painful moments of their existence. It's a terrible time, but I actually feel useful, and over the years I think that I've been able to bring some real healing for people. While I never say that I 'want' to do a funeral, I always feel honored to do so.
But the cultural landscape on this, too, is changing. While I still get called to do funerals occasionally, more and more I have noticed that for many people, even Christians, these are being replaced by a 'celebration of life'. My experience in these things is that, while at times they are still being held in funeral homes or even churches, God and his eternal promises are rarely in view. Rather, we sit and random people (almost never ministers) talk about what a good person ____ happened to be. Maybe they went to a church, probably not, but that's not what defined the deceased. Instead of the goal of life being a desire to be with the Lord forever in eternity, it's enough that such people live on in the hearts of others.
This year I have pondered a lot about the change in my country...it's easy to point out the apostasy with which many Christians have paraded about in their Christian nationalism or worship of their orange god. But it may be that when the history (and decline) of Christianity in the United States in the 21 century is written, the change we have made in funerals and weddings may have been the canary in the coal mine. If religious faith, even a shallow kind of religiosity, is removed from two of the most important elements of a culture's ritual identity, what does that say about how important it is in our daily lives? A lot, I think.
