A Volley from the Canon, #54 A Matter of Policy

A MATTER OF POLICY

At this writing, I am visiting Anniston, Alabama to officiate at the wedding of my niece Rachel in St. Michael and All Angels Church, a very beautiful English-style stone church set down incongruously in a working-class neighborhood in small-town Alabama. To do this, we had to “borrow” the church, with which no one in the family has any connection. Rachel grew up actively involved in Church of the Holy Comforter, Charlotte, NC. But when she left for college, her parents moved to suburban D. C., where she has lived only briefly after University. One day, on retirement, her parents will attend The Church of the Holy Comforter in Gadsden, Alabama, but that time is not now, and Rachel does not know that congregation. She attends graduate school in Austin, TX, where she will not reside for long. Bottom line: she is at that time of life when she has no “permanent” church congregation. She and fiancé Jonathan know they want to wed in church (and she wants it to be an Episcopal Church). But what church, where?

Sound familiar? In this highly mobile society, this scenario describes the plight of many a person, and not just twenty-somethings.

The paternal grandparents, who are not Episcopalian and limited in mobility, live near Anniston. If the wedding is held here, they can attend, and there are other family members still in Alabama. The groom, Jonathan’s, family are from Arkansas. So everyone else has to travel anyway—why not gather here?

In many instances, clergy exclusivity and hard-headedness, that’s why. How many parish clergy are even willing to listen through a convoluted story like the one above, much less to consider seriously and open-mindedly the possibility of allowing such an “outside” ceremony to be performed in “their” church? More than used to be the case, fortunately, and the Rev. Bruce White, of St. Michael and All Angels, is one of them. He and his altar guild wedding volunteers are being extraordinarily hospitable. The parish even housed the after-rehearsal dinner, food supplied by an outside caterer, of course, but making fullest use of the church’s buildings. They could hardly be more delightful to work with.

There is a substantial fee, and that is not inappropriate; after all, it costs money to maintain this impressive structure, and it is only fair to expect interlopers such as ourselves to share that responsibility. But to get to the point of this writing: congregations need to have carefully planned and thought-out written policies, with input from all concerned (altar guilds, musicians, vestries, sexton staff, clergy) as to who can be accommodated with requests to use the church facilities for meetings, weddings, funerals, baptisms, and parties, and under what circumstances. The policy needs to be designed to include and draw in, not to exclude and rule out. It needs to be attuned to the mission of the congregation. It needs to be about Stewardship, Servanthood, and Evangelism.

We’ve all been plagued by those calls: “I belong to Possum Creek Church, but your church is so pretty, I thought I’d like to have my daughter’s wedding there.” It can get pretty annoying. Still, when we respond to such requests, it wouldn’t hurt us to consider, trite as it is, “What Would Jesus Do?” In our answer, prepared by careful policy planning done in advance and not in the heat of re-action, I would hope there will always be Good News.