My friends who get married very rarely have their weddings in a church.
Now, to be fair, most of my friends aren't married - and they're not getting married. Of my high school graduating class, I think that less than a quarter of us are married. We all have rich and fulfilling lives. It seems that there is no shortage of adorable baby pictures on my Facebook feed, but marriage is less and less important. Marriage is an expensive extravagance. I read these crazy statistics - the average wedding costs $30,000 - and I just can't believe their validity. But I read my friends' woes on Facebook - a tooth needs pulled but the co-pay of $200 is too much of a luxury, hours are cut at their job, student loans piling up and still no degree, etc - and I understand that a wedding is just too expensive for a lot of people.
Weddings are a celebration of tradition and family. If your family wasn't particularly great - maybe you don't want to celebrate those things. If your parents don't want to pay for your wedding - for whatever reason - why would you go to the expense and trouble for a piece of paper.
The most common sentiment I hear from my friends is that they want to be with a person because they love this person, not because a piece of paper dictates that they need to be with this person. I agree with this sentiment.
It seems that most of my college peers are married. They mostly come from white, Christian, middle-class homes - so tradition and family are generally held quite dear.
But I notice that most of my college peers - who, almost without exception, have a very strong tie to a church and a community of believers - have their weddings at an outside venue. Some of them pay thousands of dollars to rent the venue. I even feel ridiculous writing the word "venue." They get married on sand, by water, with trees as a backdrop, in a barn, under a canopy - but not in a church.
Perhaps I'm WAY more conservative than I let on, but this bothers me. I have a theory about this. I think that most of these people come from more contemporary churches: churches that worship in glorified gymnasiums and churches that were built in the 80s and 90s. I wouldn't want to get married in one of these buildings. I've seen pictures of my friends' weddings where they had clearly spent thousands of dollars to try and mask the basketball hoop - but they weren't fooling anyone.
In our little United Methodist church here in Lviv, we've never had a wedding. Our space is small and dingy and it would be weird to have a wedding there. Most of our girls wait until they have already had their big beautiful church wedding before officially converting to Methodism. We've only had one wedding, and it was outside. Little girls in Ukraine don't dream about marrying in a Protestant service in a dingy store-front space.
Little girls in America don't dream about getting married in a big-box church or a 70s orange-carpet nightmare-cathedral. I don't think we have space to incorporate guitar solos and drum-sets in our wedding dreams. Weddings aren't "super casual - yo" and they don't fit very well into our contemporary worship experiences.
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I've read that for the average American family, Christmas is a celebration of tradition more than a celebration of Christ's birth. This makes sense to me in a very profound way. Why do we do the things that we do at Christmas time? Tradition. Why do we only drink egg-nog during one season? Tradition.
I think that American weddings are moving in this direction. We have weddings because the glamorous people in movies have weddings. In our pop-culture collective imagination weddings only happen in massive cathedrals or on a beautiful beach.
With a divorce rate that is astronomical, a government limiting who has the right to get married, and a five-figure sticker price ... I think that many of my friends have just decided that this is a tradition not worth celebrating.
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I talk with a lot of people about a lot of different things. I've always been open and receptive to any line of conversation. I'm also something like a pastor, so couples counseling is assumed to be part of my repertoire. So sometimes I learn things that surprise me.
It seems that more and more people I know are in monagamish relationships. They live together, but he's allowed to have a little strange on the side. She meets up with a 20-something from time to time just for fun and her husband is fine with it. Threesomes happen sometimes, but all within well-defined rules agreed upon ahead of time. These conversations usually begin with a very strong affirmation that "this" wasn't cheating.
On one of my favorite shows, a woman's husband is found dead in a male-hookers bed, and the wife casually says, "Every marriage is different, ours was just a little more different."
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Marriage is a trending topic in Christian circles. I would even push the idea that there are mega churches built on the foundation of family values instead of the foundation of Jesus Christ.
We read the Old Testament accounts of the fathers of our faith and we scratch our heads and do theological cartwheels to form their "acquisition of women" into an appropriate message on family values. "Solomon had how many wives? And concubines? ... And this is why you should wait until you're married to have sex."
We hear the narrative of Jesus of Nazareth, a 33 year old carpenter with 12 disciples (only one of whom has a wife to speak of, although he really doesn't speak of her very often) who mentions marriage once and promotes singleness just as much and we create an entire theology around family values.
We read Paul's extortion toward singleness for the sake of the Gospel [in college I was taught that Paul achieved a rank within the Jewish community open only to married men, so he had to have been a widower ... but either way, we know that he was single when he began his missionary journey] and we push and pull his words until we find something [Paul's radical claim that women aren't property and should be treated with love - a verse that we often use to tell women they should be subservient, but I digress] that speaks to traditional family values and marriage.
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I won't speak out against marriage, and I won't support my monagamish friends in their sexplorations. But I think that we as the church need to really re-evaluate our theology of family values in light of what the Bible actually teaches.
Because our whole concept of Christian marriage is a celebration of tradition.
We aren't celebrating the words of the Old Testament, the example of Christ, or the letter of Paul. We aren't celebrating our faith, growing as disciples, or worshiping God during wedding services.
We're bowing down to the pagan fertility gods by worshiping the concept of virginity over the faithful witness of grace offered by Christ to all. We're bowing down to the American gods of greed, avarice, and wealth by spending more than we can afford for a ceremony that is only meant to impress other people (for God is certainly not impressed by our lavish feasts and decorations). We're bowing down to tradition and claiming that it is Biblical even though almost none of our wedding traditions have any mention, bearing, or reflection of the words of scripture.
I'm not calling for an end of marriage - I just think that we should call it out for what it is.
Because I think we can do better.
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My closest friends have all had small, casual weddings with just close friends and family. My sister had a Christmas wedding and didn't spend a dime on decorations. One friend made her own dress, another wore her mother's wedding dress. One friend will only have the communion liturgy read at her wedding.
I think that in the future it will be much more common for faithful disciples to forgo the avarice and show and and to celebrate simply. I think it will be more common for Christian young people to decide if they want to get married. I think it will be more common for people to wait until they are sure that they have found someone they want to spend the rest of their lives with - even if that takes 30 years of searching.
I hope that in the future, we will be able to more fully live into the complex and complicated theology of family, love, commitment, and example that is set before us in scripture. I hope someday that we will not treat marriage as a victory dance before Pagan gods, but as a solemn promise before a loving Savior. I hope someday our theology grows to embrace all the couples that God has brought together and not just those who look like us. I hope that someday marriage will be seen as a possible step towards completing God's plan for our lives instead of an obligatory march toward parental expectations.
I think we can do better.
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