Is the Church of England getting out of the marriage business?

The Church of England appears to be in full scale retreat from the job of marrying people. And this is happening as the new government has indicated it intends to reform marriage law, which could have significant implications for the Church of England.

One of the historic articles of faith in the good old CofE has been that no matter how empty the pews are on a Sunday, somehow people will find their way back to Church for its role in the holy trinity of life events, to hatch, match and dispatch - to christen babies, marry couples and bury the dead.

Mouse is hear to beak the news that the evidence appears to show that this belief is build upon sand. Perhaps partly in response to this context, major reforms of marriage laws is planned and the new government has committed to take this forward.

In 2022 the Law Commission published a review of 'outdated wedding laws'. This review made a series of recommendations, including:

• equalising the marriage law across different religions and beliefs, removing the privileged position the Church of England holds in marriage law and allowing ministers of other religions and non-religious groups (notably humanists) to conduct legal marriages
• liberalise the law which restricts weddings to licenced venues - typically places of worship or licenced secular venues - and move to a model where the officiant is authorised, rather than the venue
• removing the distinction between religious and civil weddings and moving to a legal construct for a licenced officiant to undertake weddings on an equal basis, retaining freedom for religious weddings to hold to their formularies and traditions
• modernising the legal process around weddings, such as allowing couples to give notice of a wedding online

These proposals are only hypothetical, however, and we wait to hear more detail of the new government's intentions in this area. Their manifesto contained only a pledge to reform the law in relation to cohabiting couples, but they have made noises about legalising humanist weddings, and given a nod to the Law Commissions proposals. In response to a Parliamentary question on this issue in July, for example, Justice Minister, Alex Davies-Jones, said:

We are aware that weddings are an important issue for humanists and that the Law Commission has made recommendations for wholesale change of weddings law in July 2022. We will take the time as a new Government to properly consider this issue. We will set out our next steps on our manifesto commitment to strengthen rights and protections for women in cohabitating couples in the near future.

Within this context, one would expect the Church of England to be a significant voice. Many believe that it is the Church of England which marries many, if not most, couples in England. But this is not so.

Statistics on weddings have been dropped from the Church's annual statistical summary, Statistics for Mission, perhaps an indication of their status, but they are still available from the Office of National Statistics (where they combine the numbers for England and Wales). Mouse has run the numbers.

You don't need to be a stats wizard to see that the gap between the blue line (all marriages between opposite-sex couples) and the yellow line (marriages in the Church of England and Church in Wales) is getting bigger. In fact, the proportion of CofE / CiW marriages has dropped from around half in the early 1960s to 13% in 2022.

Church-watchers with long memories will remember the launch of a major initiative back in 2010 called the Weddings Project. It was designed to catch de-churched or un-churched couples on the look-out for a special place and way to tie the knot. A national team was assembled, resourced developed to support parishes and dioceses were engaged. There were even suggestions that it was making a difference. The decline was, to some extent stemmed. The proportion of CofE / CiW weddings stabilised at around 24% for a while.

But it was canned. 

It didn't help the project that following the legalisation of gay marriage in 2013, the CofE project was constantly followed by the caveat that church weddings are only available to opposite-sex couples, in an age when an increasing number of marriages were between same-sex couples, and opposition to gay marriage is often simply considered homophobia. 

But the reason for killing the initiative was that the strategy in vogue for church growth was swinging away from centralised teams pushing for growth and swinging towards centralised bodies dishing out cash to big churches to help them plant new churches or revive flagging churches under a new 'Vision and Strategy'. A number of central teams were abolished and the Life Events team was one of them. Since that time the decline in the proportion of weddings held in the Church of England or Church in Wales has accelerated.

Whether this new vision and strategy for church growth will work or not remains to be seen, but at least by the measure of wedding numbers the strategy is yet to show any fruits. Mouse is always very conscious that individual's decisions around where and how to marry depend on many things outside the control of the Church. But it is hard to believe that the church can have no impact.

Mouse's take on all this is that we are failing in this area. Whatever your views on same sex weddings, a full scale retreat from marriage cannot be good news for the Church.