Lay preachers performing weddings and funerals

[ffutures]

For an SF RPG I'm writing I need a version of Christianity, preferably reasonably mainstream, in which a lay preacher would be allowed to conduct weddings, funerals, etc. if there was no ordained minister available, or might be given permission to do so. I don't really need much more than the name, I just don't want to name a sect that definitely

Comments

[joereaves]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/subdivisions/quakers_1.shtml

Doesn't specifically mention weddings but I know quakers do do weddings (because in the UK they're saying that the law making gay weddings civil only is unfair and they want the legal right to perform them in the way they perform heterosexual ones) and since they feel priests and such are an interference between people and God they seem like they might be likely to be a group you could use. You'll obviously have to research to find out but since no one's definitively given you an answer yet I thought I'd suggest them.

[ffutures]

Quakers - OK, definitely another possibility. Thanks!

[nineveh_uk]

I have been to a Quaker wedding. As legally it has to take place in a normal service this means that the experience is quite strange for someone who hasn't been there before, as it is half an hour of silence with about one minute of vows*, and a couple of minutes of other people feeling moved to speak. They key is that the couple marry themselves - so it only really works if the couple _are_ Quakers. A lay preacher wouldn't work because there isn't a preacher involved at all - you need an entire community of Friends.

*Really. The vows are very, very short. "Friends, I take this my friend, Mark/Julie, to be my husband/wife, promising, through Divine assistance (or with God's help), to be unto him/her a loving and faithful husband/wife, so long as we both on earth shall live." That's it.

[marycatelli]

Well, that is the pith and essence of the vows, which are the pith and essence of the wedding.

In medieval times, you could marry just by saying that without witnesses or anything.

[criccieth]

when? far as I was aware, you still needed witnesses, if only to come forward if either party claimed to be free to marry elsewhere.

[marycatelli]

All of Europe under canon law right up until the Council of Trent. It was not approved of, it created a lot of problems with establishing whether people were married, but it was the law.