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Hi ladies,
I'm wondering how those of you who are not religious decided on an officiant for your wedding ceremony? My fiance and I are both atheist/agnostic, so we have no affiliation with any faith or church that would guide us when choosing the person to perform the ceremony. There's no one who could perform this role who knows us personally, so really we just need someone to show up and perform the function of marrying us and filing the paperwork. I feel like I should be spending some time researching to find the best-suited person to do this for us, and yet I kind of feel like anyone who's legally qualified and will respect our wishes to leave God out of the equation should be completely fine. How did ladies who had similar situations decide who to hire?
In PA using an ordained friend is only semi-legal. There is case history going both ways, so we didn't want to take the chance. Since that was our original plan, we needed to figure things out fairly quickly. We just did internet research and found a few people who said they would do secular ceremonies in the town where the wedding is being held. We contacted them and based on availability and their responses, we were able to pick one. He sent us choices for our ceremony and a basic outline so we were able to pick parts without any mention of religion.
I found a list of secular humanist officiants in our area and picked the one nearest to us. She's wonderful by the way!
I was recommended a marriage commissioner who does religious & non-religious ceremonies. She gave us a package with all sorts of ceremonies and we put ours together through her package.
She was awesome. However, if I did it without the rec. I would just search marriage commissioners in my area, find out which ones have done non-religious ceremonies, and then I would give them a call and get a feel for their attitude.
I as going to go with a non-denominational minister (as alln5051 mentioned above, PA laws can be strict,) but a friend of the family is a federal judge who really like to preform them, (and who may be doing it for free/cheap...?) so that was an easy decision. He said he has his own ceremonies that he likes but he would do whatever we wanted and he would work with us, so yay!
Also, he's Jewish and agreed to do a wedding for a couple raised protestant/agnostic, so thats a pretty fair sign that he won't get religious on us. ;)
A friend of ours got ordained to perform our ceremony. But before we asked him we made sure to have a back-up plan because we didn't want our friend to feel pressured in any way. We just researched officiants on wedding wire based on their reviews and looked for those who would allow us to write our own ceremony because I already had a ceremony draft done.
I just looked under the vendors section in Weddingbee and looked at a couple websites before I found a guy who really seemed to mesh well with what we wanted. He did turn out to be awesome :).
We looked online, weddingwire, google, called local town clerks (they usually have a list of officiants and judges who will officiate weddings). At the end we asked a close friend of ours to marry us. Best decision EVER!
I found ours through weddingwire.com. She's an ordained wedding minister and can perform religious ceremonies, but will customize any ceremony that people choose. She has a bunch of examples of christian, secular and mixed ceremonies. There were also a bunch of judges listed when I was looking for an officiant. I will say, we were not specifically looking for a non-religious officiant, it just happened that way.
I looked up Justices of the Peace online and tried to find reviews, and just picked one. We met him, and he seemed fine and had a nice voice, so we went ahead and booked.
Like some of the PP’s, we had a loved one get ordained to marry us and it was one of the best things we did. There’s nothing like having someone you love marry you. The alternative was to pick some random schmuck out of the phone book and that didn’t appeal to me at all. Why would I want to pay some stranger $300 to pronounce us husband and wife with zero emotion behind it when my cousin could get ordained for free and be emotionally vested into the whole thing? She got chocked up a few times but it just added to the whole feel of the ceremony. She was super nervous but she kicked ass and EVERYONE the fact that we were married by a family member. If it’s legal where you’re from and you have someone in mind, do it! Trust me, you won’t regret it.
My grandparents were florists for 43 years before they retired and every sat we would deliver alter arrangements to the church we are getting married at for the Sunday service. The pastor was always so nice to me, and in a way watched me grow up even if it was just for a few minutes every Saturday lol. I remembered how awesome he was, and told FI we set up a meeting and I am so glad that we did. He is awesome!! He did great pre marital counciling sessions with us and really wanted to make our ceremony everything that we wanted! I cant wait to have him marry us!!
@starbuck: Or word of mouth! :)
We're actually meeting one of our possible officiants this evening and she does secular ceremonies in NYC. PM me if you'd like the info. She's AMAZING.
Ordained family members. Although FI & I are agnostic, our families are mostly religious. And I would have a hard time coming up with a format/content without Christian traditions. I am totally fine with a Christian ceremony as long as I do not have to pledge faith in something I don't believe in.
So we're asking my mom's cousin to officiate. She knows our background. Should she decline later on, we have more ordained family members we could rely on.
We went through a few steps. 1)We wanted someone who could perform a handfasting and had done it before. 2)We narrower those down by price, some were charging way too much. 3)Online reviews.
My officiant was kind of crazy... but she did a good job and was super friendly and awesome.
We had a friend of ours who is also non-religious become "ordained" online to perform the ceremony which I wrote.
A good friend of FI's and mine. He just got permission from Vital Stats Canada to officiate our wedding, and only ours. I like to think it'll be like Chandler and Monica's wedding! ...without the army suit Joey wore.
@starbuck: Hi!
There are many officiants that can perform amazing non-religious-yet-spiritually-filled ceremonies. You can research some on the Wedding Wire vendors page.
I am especifically one of them, if you have any questions or need any help please let me know.
You can check my website at:
thanks for all the great suggestions ladies! @Lemma, I actually contacted someone I found on your secular humanists listing. And I will check out Weddingwire too.
A good friend of my fiance's just got ordained - not because we asked him to, but because he wanted to - and when we heard about it we decided to ask him. We haven't gotten married yet, obviously, but I'm really excited about it even though this isn't a person I actually know. It will still be nice for the ceremony to have a more personal touch.
@starbuck: We are using a judge. He was the only judge who could do weddings for a 100 mile radius. He used to do 400 weddings a year!
We found ours on weddingwire.com! She had GREAT reviews. So far... she has been incredibly helpful!
I don't know the laws in Oregon yet, I still need to check it out. We would really want to have our close friend ordained. He's known FI since first grade and I've known him since junior year of high school.
I checked Google and Wedding Wire for officiants and found ours. She does both religious and non religious ceremonies. She's great because she will customize the ceremony to fit whatever vision you have.
We each picked an important person in our life that the other has come to know and appreciate. They're going to co-officiate, and one is going to get online ordained. If there are any legal issues with that (we still have to look up all the details), we're just going to go to the courthouse with our parents earlier that morning, get the legalities taken care of, and have the wedding and ceremony that actually means something to us later that evening.
We have some friends that had their wedding planned for October, but due to health and insurance issues, found themselves getting married at the court seven months prior. Although they were legally married, they still consider the ceremony and wedding their anniversary.
We are having FI's brother and best man officate. We are writing the ceremony ourselves using A LOT of inspiration from the web.
We contacted the secular humanist officiate who had married Moutain Man's father and step mother back in the last century.... it was a gesture of continuity.
Honestly we chose ours because he was gay! That sounds like reverse-discrimination, but it meant something to us. And he marries a lot of gays in our province.
One of FI's co-workers is a notary, so he offered to be our officiant (for free!) :)
We're using an actual minister, but just because he's a girl-friend's dad and we've seen him officiate non-denominational weddings in the past...
In Canada, the Department of Vital Statistics has a link to lists of officiants in each area... I wonder if the States would have something similar...?
Good luck!
Seriously, we are going for the cheapest. Our ceremony will be 10-15 minutes tops, I am not trying to spend a fortune for that.
Resntapriest.com Also the search tool on weddingwire and theknot. We looked for nondenominational/humanist reverends. We just designed our ceremony and there is no mention of god, the holy spirit, heaven, or prayer.
We had a close family friend do it. She happened to be an Episcopalian Reverand, but her beliefs are very liberal and we were OK with her doing it because of who she was. We did strip out as much of the religious stuff as she allowed us to.
It was short and sweet with just a quick prayer and blessing that was pretty secular in its words.
Here in Florida you can officiate a wedding just as a notary public. We talked to our friend and asked him if he would consider getting his notary license. He signed up for the class the next week! We are very happy that we will have our friend performing our ceremony. He knows what we will want said during the ceremony and what to definitely leave out. It is also extra special because he is getting this license just to perform our wedding.
I did A LOT of online searching for an inter-faith/spiritual officiant who wasn't going to be overbearing or impersonal. I got really lucky with mine.
Reverend Dawn is awesome if anyone in Georgia is interested - http://www.revdawn.com/. Don't let the "reverand" put you off. She's really open to doing non-religious ceremonies.
I was provided a list of vendors from one of the venues I considered for my wedding. I then did internet research, and read all the reviews. I made sure they offered templates that suited our needs. We wanted to avoid being expected to write our own vows out of whole cloth, and also wanted to avoid anything too new age or hedonistic (often assumed of secular couples for some reason). The person we selected had several well written templates, which we could edit and build to our own specifications or use as is. The communication has also been rather easy going, and perhaps one of the only vendors who hasn't managed to cause me stress (at least not yet).
I'm using a non-religious friend who is ordained (for the purpose of marrying people). If I hadn't had her as an option, I'd have looked for a judge or other person capable of performing civil ceremonies.
My FI's cousin is a pastor, and is also one of my FI's good friends. He will be performing our ceremony, and we have just started to work with him on how we want our ceremony to look.
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