Hi Mike,

My wife sent you an e- mail a few days ago, but has not received an answer yet. The question that she was asking is very important to her. It may be a silly question to you. Here it is. She and I have made our funeral arrangements some time ago, and she was wondering if when one of us dies do we have to have a minister do a service of some kind for the family that remains? One other question. The reason for the second question is that since learning so many things about the church that we have attended all our life, we now have left the church and no longer attend any. Here is the question. Suppose our son or daughter is planning to get married. Where should they go for the ceremony to become man and wife? We are really confused about these two things seeing we are no longer in a church, and living in Montreal, we don’t have the pleasure of attending any of your classes or get togethers. Would you please answer these two questions?

M____

Hi M____,

I am sorry that I have not yet gotten to your wife’s letter. I certainly do not consider any of your questions to be either silly or unimportant. I simply do what I can to keep up with emails.

The answer to your first question about a funeral ceremony is that what is said after one’s death is of no consequence as far as where that person is with God. If a minister were to ‘preach’ you either into heaven or hell, God’s mind would not be swayed by that sermon. Since you have come out of the church, I assume that you have no intention of using an orthodox minister at your funeral. In that case you can do what we did at the funeral of the wife of a very dear brother in Christ. He had asked me to do the speaking, and I did. I told their very large family that as far as my friend and his wife were concerned she was dead and awaiting a resurrection. I told them that if they were interested in honoring their mother, they would follow her example of loving God and her husband by obeying and submitting to both God and her husband. I assured them all that their mother would be raised up in the presence of the Lord and would be given life.

Then after comforting the family I asked each member of the family who wanted to do so to come forward and say something about their mother. It was a very good experience hearing how much their mother meant to them all. Also, it was good for my friend to hear what his children thought of the way he and his wife had reared their children.

Had I not even been at that funeral, that part of the service would have been sufficient for the family. So just allow the family members to speak at your funeral. There are no Biblical injunctions concerning funeral services or weddings other than what we are told about the fact that people were both married and buried and mourned. However, we are told not to mourn as do others, because we have the hope of a resurrection.

To answer your question about marriage, there are many people who can legally perform a marriage who are not ministers. Here in Georgia a ‘justice of the peace,’ whose title has recently been changed to a magistrate, can perform a wedding. In fact in this state, anyone who is eighteen years of age can legally perform a wedding without benefit of a license. In reality, it is God who joins a couple together. Legality is for legal purposes. When one applies for a marriage license, once it is signed, that marriage is legally binding, so in reality no ceremony is legally necessary. I certainly believe that a couple who are in love should have no problem making their marriage legally binding as well as spiritually binding. The principle is hidden in this verse:

Mat 15:11 Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth [from the heart], this defileth a man.

I hope this is of some use to you both. God is not big on ritual of any kind. God is very big on what is in our hearts. Our hearts need Christ in them, and then all these other things take care of themselves.

I hope this has served to give you some guidance on these two questions. If I have not gotten to the source of your concern, please let me know.

Mike