This is Not Your Grandmother's Wedding March

I love - LOVE - their abundant and evident joy in this procession.

I love their creativity in the planning and execution of meaningful worship.

I love that they are not only bringing but celebrating their God-given gifts, gifts in which they take obvious delight, to this momentous occasion in their life together.

I love the metaphor of life and marriage as a dance.

I love that this song captures the anticipatory joy of both this particular moment, and the enduring life that lies before them (refreshing amidst a wedding culture that focuses so much energy on making this one day "perfect" and forgets or ignores the challenging and rewarding work of building a marriage over a lifetime).

I love that, in shaking up the "norm," they probably (hopefully) opened this congregation's eyes to see and hear and experience and reflect upon marriage and the marriage ceremony in a new way.

I love that this couple is using their unexpected celebrity to raise awareness and money for some of the least of these.

BUT (you knew a big but had to be coming, didn't you?). . .

Ever since watching this, I've kept asking myself, "If I was this couple's pastor, would I have allowed them to do this?"

And for all the things I appreciate in how thoughtfully and joyfully they carried this out, for all the good I can imagine it doing in this congregation and the world, the answer I keep coming back to is, "No."

And it's not because I think popular culture/music is godless - to the contrary, I find God all over the place in pop culture.

And it's not because I think dancing is of the devil - to the contrary, I think dancing is one of many beautiful, creative ways to express our joy and worship of the Lord.

And it's not because I'd be afraid of taking flak from members of the congregation who may find it irreverent - to the contrary, though I've learned the hard way that I do need to be wise as to who I invest such social capital in, if I knew this couple well and had a good working relationship with them, so that I trusted they were doing this as worship not merely for the spectacle of it, I would gladly absorb any blows that came our way, and vigorously defend the theology of their worship planning.

No, the reason I would say "no" is because, as a pastor, I have to think not only about the implications of the immediate moment, but also about the future implications of our actions and the precedents they would set. I have to be a good steward, not only of my relationship with this couple, but also with all future couples with whom I may be planning a wedding.

Suppose I say yes to a couple I know well, who either approaches me with an appropriate song or we work together to find an appropriate song. Now I've set a precedent. I may see my precedent as allowing for creative, well-planned worship. Others may interpret it as "She'll let anything go."

Now let's suppose the next couple who approaches me about a wedding wants a song of a similar musical style, but with completely inappropriate lyrics. Now I'm stuck having to argue the finer points of theology and appropriateness of worship music, and it could be very difficult to get them to actually listen to what I'm saying instead of closing off and sulking about me being unfair, or arbitrary, or showing preferential treatment to other couples. From there, things just have the potential to get ugly, and my relationship with them could be damaged quickly.

Lest you think I'm being paranoid, a good pastor friend had a situation - it wasn't even that they'd allowed for an exception to their church's wedding music policy previously, but they had a bride who was just insistent on having some completely inappropriate music in the service. When my friend said no, this bride started triangulating other members of the congregation, and even people who weren't members of the congregation but were mutual friends of this family and others in the congregation, causing all kinds of turmoil in the community and making my friend's life pretty miserable for a while.

So, with all the anxious energy and stress that already surrounds most weddings these days, I just find it easier to have and enforce a church policy that only allows for fairly well-defined "churchy" music at a wedding.

Maybe that make me a wimp. Maybe that makes me a curmudgeon.

Maybe that makes me way less open to the spontaneous joy of the Holy Spirit than I'd like to be.

But I just want something really solid in my corner when I go to the mat with a Bridezilla.