AUDIO

TRANSCRIPT

Hey there, welcome to the Perform a Wedding course. My name is Brandon Hilgemann. I’m the founder of ProPreacher.com, a website dedicated to helping pastors, and I’ve been in pastoral ministry for over 15 years in churches large and small. And in that time, as you can imagine, I have performed a lot of weddings.

So here’s what I know: Few questions bring a greater sense of honor and anxiety wrapped into one than the first time someone asks you, “Will you perform our wedding?”

I was terrified to do my first wedding. In all my years of Bible College and Seminary, I never had a class on performing a wedding. I was fortunate enough to have relationships with some godly older pastors in my life who were willing to teach me the ropes and answer some questions. But not everyone has that. I wish I had a course like this to help me out, but I couldn’t find one. So that’s why I created this course. 

I want to guide you from start to finish, teaching you everything I wish I knew about performing weddings that I had to learn the hard way.

Marriage is a beautiful gift from God. It was his idea. He instituted it in the very beginning between the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden. 

God created everything, and one by one, he looks at everything he made and says, “It is good.” The heavens, good. The sea, good. The land and trees, good. All the animals on land and see, all good. And then he looks at Adam, all alone. And for the first time, God says, “It is not good.” So God institutes marriage in Genesis 2:18-23 (ESV): 

18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19 Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

In addition to this, you probably recall that Jesus, although never married, also showed his blessing of marriage by performing his first miracle while attending a wedding, turning water into wine when the party ran dry.

I won’t dive much deeper into the theology of marriage in this course, but we must understand that marriage is a beautiful covenantal promise between a man and woman. In this ceremony, the bride and groom leave the protective care of their mother and father and unite together as one, a new family unit that is only to be parted by death.

A healthy marriage is a tremendous blessing, providing us with lifelong companionship, support, love, comfort, joy, help in times of need, and so much more. It’s God’s intended plan for human reproduction, and the building block of every flourishing society. When marriages suffer, families, children, and communities suffer as well.

Marriage is a beautiful, holy, sacred, and wonderful institution worthy of celebrating. And you and I have the honor and privilege of being part of it when we are asked to perform a wedding. 

In case you can’t tell, I love weddings because I love the beauty that God created healthy, biblical marriages to be. So I hope you don’t take this lightly. I hope you feel the weight of this great privilege God has given you to support and guide each couple through this ceremony and perhaps be there for them for support and guidance for many years to come.

But don’t be scared. Take a deep breath if I just made you a little nervous. You can do this. And this course will help walk you it each step of the way.

Not too long ago, I had the privilege of performing a wedding for a young couple that my wife and I had been mentoring since they were in high school. I was so grateful that they saw me as someone who made a difference in their lives and asked me to be part of their big day. But at the same time, I was still anxious because I wanted to do a great job for these people that I loved.

Even as long as I’ve been doing this, I still get a bit nervous. So if you’ve never performed a wedding before, it can be incredibly intimidating.

Where do you even start?

If that’s you, you have come to the right place. I am confident that this course will help. And even if you are a wedding veteran, this will still be a helpful way to sharpen your skills.

So here’s a rundown of everything I’ve learned.

We’ll start first with the legal side of things. I know, “How exciting!” But don’t skip over that. It’s very, very, very important that you get the legal side of things right, and I promise you that I won’t bore you with all of the details.

After that, I’ll walk you through what to do in your first meeting with the future Bride and Groom. Then, we’ll talk about planning the wedding with them (and I’ll give you my very own wedding planning cheat sheet to help with that). Next, we’ll briefly cover premarital counseling because that could be an entire course in itself. But I’ll provide you with a few resources and an example of how to do premarital counseling.

Then we’ll talk about the rehearsal, which I am finding that many couples today choose to skip. But you still need to be ready in case you are required to do it because you probably will at some point.

And finally, last but not least, we’ll go over the big day of the wedding.

Are you ready? Let’s move on to the next lesson and hit the legal stuff you need to know.