SHOULD MARRIAGE AND BAPTISM BE ROLLED INTO ONE?

This is why the idea of the manically cheerful “hatch andmatch” is so horrid. While we all know brides are rarely virgins and that the youngest bridesmaid is actually the groom’s daughter by a previous relationship, the point of a wedding is that you put all that aside and focus on the marvellous triumph of hope over experience that is a marriage.

The focus is on two people who promise to love each other until death do them part. We ought to have the time to savour that, to reflect on what it means for them and what it says to us.

Instead of that interlude of wonderment (which even the most cynical often find extraordinarily moving), the event will be shrill, busy, rushed, full of wailing children. Before our eyes the beautiful bride will transform into harassed mum before she even has a chance to throw her bouquet.

Mendelssohn’s Wedding March will lose all point if, having strode from the church as husband and wife, the couple have to pop back in for the children’s christenings.

Those who love the Anglican Church love it for its quiet gravity, for the beauty of the language and the rhythms of the liturgy.

All that will be lost in this rush towards inclusive jollity.

YES says Rev Joanna Jepson

LAST year I was enjoying a conversation with a young couple in my parish as we made plans for their wedding.

But as the devastation of the recession began to wreak havoc in more and more lives this couple’s wedding became another loss.

With sadness they told me they were unable to afford it and postponed it indefinitely.

A couple of months ago their recession-dented joy was revived when they announced to me that they were expecting a baby – the moment for wedding talk had, it seemed, passed.

For this couple, along with thousands of others, the financial obligations involved in modern-day life form the basis for so many social and moral decisions.

The belief it is better to postpone one’s wedding because of the costs involved – an average £20,000 at the last count – than find a way of tying the knot less expensively suggests our thinking has become more than a little skewed.

Somewhere along the consumer-driven wheel of life the focus has shifted from the importance of marriage vows to the importance of a reception with so many trimmings that couples begin married life deep in debt. Not only is it time for the Church to find ways to help couples overwhelmed by the pressure to pull off a celebrity-style wedding day, it is our very role in society to do so.

By designing a new service for wedding and baptism combined the Church is making a clear point: we are here to serve parishioners, not add to the many financial and social hurdles they already encounter.

Critics suggest this new two-in-one liturgical offer demeans the moral and sacred significance of marriage. I disagree. The increasing breakdown of marriage and common-law partnerships is setting us up for crippling repercussions in terms of social cohesion.

People ultimately choose their pattern of family life and the Church is not there to control those decisions. however the Church is letting people down if it doesn’t provide accessible ways for people to understand, reinforce and celebrate these ties within a bigger framework of the Church family.

Denying the opportunity for baptism because the parents aren’t married only leaves them distressed and more isolated.

Standing in aloof judgment over people because of the mistakes they have made or relationships that have failed makes it impossible to reach out to them.

By providing the possibility for marriage and baptism together the Church welcomes people whatever their life experience, while sticking by its belief in the marriage covenant.

It is because society has got so lost in consumerism and individualism that the Church is right to make a way for people to strengthen and celebrate the most important things we have in life: our relationships.