How to Find Your Wedding Celebrant Using Logic & Intuition

A few things you can do to make sure you find the right celebrant to get the wedding you want

Besides the bride or groom, the wedding celebrant is one of the most important people in your wedding. Legally speaking, the celebrant is the most important person. The officiant you choose to marry you will play a big role in setting the tone of your ceremony and ensuring that you have the type of wedding you want. Not every officiant performs the same wedding ceremony. Not every officiant will agree to customizations to the traditional ceremony. That’s why it is so important that you think carefully about the type of wedding celebrant you want and search carefully before making a decision.

4 Logical ways to choose your wedding celebrant

Decide on the Type of Ceremony You Want

Traditionally, wedding ceremonies have been religious. Weddings have historically been sanctified by churches. Many people still believe in the role of a higher power in their weddings. Today, many couples choose to get married for love. Some don’t believe in a higher power at all. Some look at marriage as little more than a legal contract they need to protect their assets and their children.
Talk with your fiancé about what you want in your ceremony and how it should reflect your beliefs. Do you want a religious ceremony? Or do you want something that mentions spirituality and a higher power but makes no reference to a specific god or scripture? Do you want something that is completely secular?
The answers to these questions will determine if you should be interviewing a civil celebrant, minister, a non-denominational leader, a humanist, a pagan, or some other type of officiant.

Discuss Your Religious Beliefs

If you decide that you want a religious ceremony, you have a lot more to discuss. In the simplest scenario, you both have the same faith. But then you still must decide if you want to be married by your childhood minister or his. Or you may have to consider family wishes for a certain minister or priest.
If you have different faiths, it can be more complicated. Are you Hindu but he’s Jewish? These faiths have very different wedding ceremonies and spiritual leaders, and a Hindu wedding celebrant is very different from a rabbi. The difference may not be as stark. Maybe you’re Catholic and he’s Methodist. You’ll still have issues to discuss in terms of your ceremony.
One spiritual leader may not agree to incorporate aspects of different faiths in your ceremony. You may need to talk with a nondenominational or non-sectarian leader to perform your ceremony if you want multiple religious aspects included.

Discuss Language Needs

Perhaps most of your family lives in France, and you want to have the ceremony in French. You will need to find a wedding celebrant who can speak French fluently, not just recite a script in French. Unexpected things happen during a ceremony, and you need someone who can communicate well with guests and who can improvise seamlessly during the ceremony.
Decide if you want to have part or all of your ceremony performed in another language, and search for an officiant who can speak that language fluently.
Also, consider having a dual-language ceremony for family members on both sides of the aisle. If that is what you want, search for an appropriate officiant.

Equality Matters

You can help by advertising that you support the campaign for equality to save both you and your couple time. This is not just an important factor for same-sex couples trying to find a celebrant. It is important to couples who are not affected by the current marriage laws in Australia and strongly support the push for equal rights. To show your support so that all loving and committed couples are free to marry, visit equalitycampaign.org.au.
 

Start using intuition to choose your wedding celebrant

Connect & Shortlist

We’ve all heard the phrase “go with your gut”.  This is the process of making a decision, without processing much information.  This simple method is being used by couples to chose their celebrant. It’s your intuition. It’s a time-saver! We all possess this skill, however, some of us need more practice than others. When asked how a celebrant was chosen, the most common response was by looking at a photo. Just looking at a photo people!

I googled Melbourne celebrants.  I’m a little bit spiritual and deep so I chose 3 that I had a connection with via just a pic of their face. And then I called each of them and the best connection was hired.
– Chanel 

They didn’t check any references or view resume’s to find the most qualified person for the job. They just read a face. It takes just 0.3 of a second to gather information about someone based on their posture, how they smile and looking deep into their eyes. When you have found those that you feel a connection with, you will then need to test your skills and get to know your celebrant over the phone or over a coffee.

Get to know your celebrants for realsies

First, think logically and ask about fees and available dates. You may find a perfect wedding celebrant and then learn that the person isn’t available for your date or is out of your price range. Getting this out of the way first will save you time and effort. Then, make sure you are comfortable with the officiant and check the officiant will agree to all your requests for the ceremony.
Once you know what you want in your ceremony, you can start interviewing wedding celebrants. Set up several interviews so you can get to know the officiants and ask all your questions. If you haven’t started looking yet, a good place to start is our list of celebrants.
Ask the wedding celebrant for a sample ceremony or readings used so you know exactly what to expect. Ask to see a video of a ceremony or to attend a ceremony where possible to see the officiant in action. You may know that the officiant will deliver a religious ceremony, but you may not know, for example, that this officiant likes to go off book and start proselytising. These are the things you want to find out about before you hire an officiant.
Make no assumptions about what you’ll be able to do in the ceremony. Ask potential officiants about everything you want to do, including writing your own vows, provide your own readings, or even write parts of the ceremony yourself. Get everything in writing if you can, as well as final approval of the ceremony script.
Finding a wedding celebrant is one of the most important tasks for your wedding, so it’s one of the things you should do first. Once you know you have the right person on board to perform your wedding, you can rest easy and let the other details fall into place. You’ll enjoy the wedding planning process much more.