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Introduction

When Jill and Kevin Peterson married in a Lutheran Church in Minnesota, some of the family couldn’t make it to the wedding. So an uncle took a five-minute video and posted it on You Tube.

If you haven’t seen it yet, search online for Jill and Kevin Wedding and press play.

It became a worldwide internet phenomenon. Friends sent it to friends who sent it to friends. After two years more than 70 million had watched it, and thousands posted goodwill messages or sent cash gifts to the couple’s nominated charity.

What is going on when the world is magnetised by images of a bride arriving in a church on her wedding day?

On national radio a Church of England vicar condemns the spendthrift spirit of our times and its effect on the modern wedding. These are now, he says, ‘too often a glitzy stage set, more concerned with the shoes, the flowers the napkin rings and performing to the cameras’.

Is a wedding nothing but a party for a culture consumed by celebrity, or a hallowed moment yearned for by a spiritually serious generation?

When Steve and Zoe dined one Valentine’s night in Rugby, Steve had arranged for the waiter to bring a red rose with every course. When he proposed, Zoe agreed. They walked home as if on air. Suddenly, a church they had never noticed before seemed to loom up at the side of the road. Neither of them church goers, they went in to ask if they could marry there. They could. They did. And they never left.

What would it take for more people to discover church through their wedding and stick with it after the day?

This book is about growing the Church, numerically and spiritually, through weddings.

It is a book for clergy. It contains insights for the people who support clergy in their weddings ministry, but it is mainly for clergy, or as we say in the Weddings Project, ‘vicars’.

Why ‘vicars’? You may not be a vicar. You may be a curate, a rector, a canon, NSM, LOM, SSM, or retired bishop. But if you are an ordained person spotted in or near a parish church then most people in England will call you a vicar. The Weddings Project has tried to see things from the public’s point of view, and that has affected its public vocabulary. This is a book for vicars about growing the Church through weddings and it’s based on the evidence that vicars really matter to the growth of the Church. If applied in seven simple ways, this evidence can increase the strength and depth of congregations everywhere.

Evidence-based growth

The Weddings Project is an idea of the Archbishops’ Council, and it’s an idea that grew out of the Church of England Marriage Measure of 2008. The Council has a set of objectives, the first of which is to grow the Church in depth and strength (see http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/structure/archbishopscouncil/objectives.aspx).

In 2008, when the General Synod initiated a new law to make it easier to marry in church, the Archbishops’ Council came up with an idea to go with it. The idea was to discover what opportunities for church growth still lay in the age-old Anglican weddings ministry.

In the Weddings Project, the Church of England was doing something it had never done before. It was investing what amounted to a tiny percentage of income from a big ministry area in research and development for mission. From its investment the Archbishops’ Council wanted to see a measurable difference, and it wanted facts to prove it. It wanted to know, for example, how much truth there is in the idea that people only choose church for the look of the building. It wanted to know why couples choose marriage, when living together is what they tend to do first. And the Council wanted to know what it would take to retain more people in the worshipping life of congregations. In other words, it wanted more of them to ‘stick’ after the wedding.

Over the course of the Weddings Project people have asked why we didn’t branch out, for example into an investigation of other relationship choices, or take a particular interest in the marriage of people with a previous partner still living. Still others wished we had produced a critique of the liturgy or made more marriage-preparation resources. But the Archbishops’ Council gave the team a focus on the changes the Marriage Measure would bring, and a deadline. If any ideas emerged which were intriguing but beyond scope, the team had to put them in a metaphorical fridge while they got on with the main thing. The measurable growth of the Church through weddings is what the work, and this book, is all about.

So the Weddings Project is a church growth project. And it is an evidence-based project.

In its quest for evidence, the Archbishops’ team didn’t go where the Church has gone before, like to books in libraries or to clergy conferences or to university professors. The Church of England decided to investigate matters by asking the public first. These were couples interviewed in their homes, or men recorded talking to their mates about love and marriage. They were brides at wedding shows and the general public through phone polling. They were not the only people who were quizzed about what they thought, but they were central. The Church went to them first.

Through diligent, public-focused enquiry the team demolished some big myths and uncovered good news. And when the Weddings Project team took the fruits of the work around the country, some people asked: ‘Who are the theologians of marriage you have drawn from and where can we buy their books?’

The theologians of marriage are people like Sarah, Steve, Leanne, Dave and hundreds more. They don’t normally go to church, but they went for a wedding, and they told us what they thought of it. What they said might surprise you and certainly gave something for the big thinkers in the Church to reflect on.

So this book does not bring you anecdote, supposition or hunch. When it comes to weddings, the Weddings Project has found out the facts.

Holy insights

As well as approaching the research task in a markedly different way from before, the Weddings Project team sought new insights from God in prayer. We were led to an icon from the Eastern tradition which shows the banqueting table in Cana and the wedding Jesus went to. Counter to the way things usually go with icons, Christ himself is not central. The couple is. Jesus is painted off to the edge, only recognisable because of the halo the artist has given him. He is near to the servants who are pouring out the miracle. His mother Mary leans against him, whispering in his ear (see http://parishableitems.wordpress.com/category/salvation-history/wedding-of-cana/).

One or two around the table are startled by the quality of what’s in their glass. The happy couple are delightedly oblivious to what is happening. Our Lord doesn’t take any credit. He didn’t take a bow. He didn’t send a bill. Only the servants know what is really happening.

This idea, that weddings are a moment to put the couple centre stage and for those of us in the Church to take a lesser place at the edge of the action, led the team to York, and to Archbishop John Sentamu. In commissioning the Weddings team, he approved this way of thinking:

I want the Weddings Project to be a way of saying to everybody: Come. You’re welcome. Into God’s church, where we are all guests, where we want everybody to come and find out about the love of God in Jesus Christ. That’s what I did as a vicar, that’s what I still continue to do. It is not my church, it’s not vicar X’s church, it’s not parishioners X’s or Y’s church, but the church of Jesus Christ, in which we are his guests, he is the host. And he asks us by our worship, our prayer, our witness, to bring more and more friends to him.

This sort of idea has its foundation in the work of Bishop John V. Taylor. He wrote of baptism that the Church is guest – not host – at a sacrament instituted and graced by God. And this, of course, has particular resonance in marriage, as in Anglican theology the couple marry each other. They themselves are the ministers of the sacrament and the marriage is effected when they say their vows. It’s their wedding. The Church brings its liturgy, its traditions and the legal direction and declarations. But the Church is not the host. Christ is the host.

So what does putting a couple centre stage mean? If it means putting their preferences ahead of our own, what are these preferences? And how can we say ‘yes’ to the things that unchurched people prefer while honouring all that’s sacred, orderly and 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.