London vicar: ‘Wedding planners are employed by the Devil’

A rector gives the low-down on the modern church wedding and the people who really make life difficult for the vicar in charge

Our church is a popular one for weddings. We have around 20 a year. St Bartholomew the Great was one of the four churches featured in Four Weddings and a Funeral and sometimes people want to get married here because of the film. I find that quite funny because it’s the church where the wedding actually didn’t take place; it’s where Charles (Hugh Grant) is about to marry Duck Face (Anna Chancellor) but when the vicar asks if there is any reason the marriage shouldn’t go ahead, Charles says he’s in love with somebody else and Duck Face knocks him out. It’s hardly an auspicious moment, but it does attract some people. 
In the social media age, images of the wedding really matter to people. I understand that: people love to treasure their memories. But there are so many people involved nowadays: the photographer, the person making the film of the wedding, the wedding planner, all the people in the congregation can be taking pictures on their mobiles, so we have a lot to contend with during the service. Sometimes the photographer and the videographer compete with one another for the best spot for their images. 
Some of my clergy colleagues will shoot me for saying this but when it comes to mobiles, I leave that up to the couple. Some will say “We are paying for a photographer, we don’t want pesky iPhone snaps getting out there first”, so they’ll have a no-cameras request. With others, everyone takes a snap as the bride comes down the aisle and if that’s the vibe the couple wants, that should lead my approach to the wedding. 
Then there are clergy who won’t work with the official photographer, saying they’re disrespectful. It was reported this week that a petition complaining about vicars being rude had attracted more than 1,000 signatures. In my experience, the most difficult moment is when a photographer wants to come right up to the couple when they are making their vows because that is distracting. With the lenses you can have nowadays you really don’t need to be that close. They can find a way around it. But if they want to do it, they will do it even if you ask them not to. Then there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t want to make a scene but you can see that if a photographer is too close they are distracting the couple who should be looking into one another’s eyes when they are making their vows. 
I’ve been rector of St Bartholomew the Great since 2018 and the more weddings that I conduct the more I work with photographers, so the easier the relationship becomes. We have a few spots for them that can help. There’s a pulpit we use for evensong right at the back that they like, and there’s a balcony where the organ console was right at the top and some of them like to shoot from there. But we are a large church. In a small country church there won’t be many places for the photographer to set up so a photographer is much more limited in what he or she can do. The key thing for a vicar is to get to the church early and then work with the photographer – and for each of them not to get aggressive. 
But the real villains here aren’t the photographers, it’s the wedding planners. They are employed by the Devil. 
The fundamental problem with most wedding planners is that they are entirely pointless. They have to create a purpose so they create drama in order to smooth over it. They often don’t know how church services work or how the church building works and they cause trouble. At best they think about what flowers to have, where the flowers will go and who sits where. But there are wedding planners who think they can re-order the service and have it take place at a different angle. They ask: “Can we use that altar instead?”, not understanding we’re using the main altar. 
One wanted a winter wonderland in the church, complete with fake snow. They hadn’t factored in that the bride was able to walk down it to get to the altar but she and the groom together weren’t able to fit through the avenue of birch trees and so on to get out. 
They like to say “Oh we can’t possibly have a reading at that stage in the service” and sometimes they even want the vows moved. They have no idea about the liturgy. There are often battles over timing. If you are officiating at a couple of weddings a day and they say to the bride “Oh you can be really late arriving” when you know you’ve got another wedding with another bride arriving in the not too distant future, that really is not going to work.  
We’re officiating at weddings in an era when understanding of the Church is decreasing rapidly. Even people who want to get married in a church often don’t know much about it. So a couple will visit the church when the altar frontal is green because of the liturgical season and when they get married it’s red because it’s, say, the eve of Pentecost, and then they’ll say, “Oh my God, it’s not fitting in with our colour scheme.”
But we are the Church of England, the Established Church, and everybody is entitled to marry in it. You don’t have to be a baptised Christian, so long as you meet the criteria for getting married. One of those is attending the church for six months before the wedding. They don’t even have to live in the parish; they can drive to the church. 
People don’t always understand the limitations on weddings. There are liturgical seasons when weddings aren’t possible – we can’t have them in Lent and Advent – and people can get cross about that, especially with restrictions on Advent, because they want to get married in the run-up to Christmas. It just wouldn’t be possible logistically either. We have so many carol services then and we have practically every night in December booked for the next three years. 
There are also people who want to get married on New Year’s Eve and we have to remind them that the Church says you can only get married in daylight hours. We get people wanting a wedding by candlelight; you can do that in November without it being officially dark. If you are willing to opt for 3pm on a November afternoon, candles don’t hurt. But at night in the run-up to midnight on New Year’s Eve? Even if we could conduct weddings at night, I don’t think the choir is going to agree. And if they ask for New Year’s Day, I suggest they negotiate directly with the director of music. I know what the answer will be. 
All these are modern complications, but my hope always is that for whatever reason they first came to the church for their wedding, they will be inspired to come back – and it does happen all the time. A good number of people being confirmed in recent years are people who first came to the church to be married. 
And as for another consequence of weddings in the social media age: I do find myself dotted around places like Instagram. The couples will usually tag the church but sometimes it’s me so there I am. It’s amazing to think how many people have looked at my face, beaming there behind the happy couple, on social media.
As told to Catherine Pepinster
Father Marcus Walker is rector of St Bartholomew the Great, City of London, which marked its 900th anniversary in 2023