In a civil marriage service, it is the Marriage Celebrant that designs and delivers the wedding ceremony by interpreting the wishes of the couple (usually the bride and her mother) and steering them in the direction of success.

On the day, the Marriage Celebrant is the event manager until the wedding is over. It’s a big responsibility, and bearing in mind the varied backgrounds of the Celebrant body, there is a substantial difference between the abilities of various Celebrants to deliver.

The Federal Attorney General’s Department administers the whole scheme and one of their rules is that the Marriage Celebrant is in the business of Celebrancy, not in the business of providing wedding services.

The Marriage Act 1961 is fantastic in the flexibility it gives couples in their choice of the location, content and style of their marriage ceremony.

To get married, all you need is the bride and groom, the celebrant and two witnesses.

You don’t even need to know the witnesses, you can grab two passers bye, and they don’t even have to give you their addresses.

To do the minimum, the Celebrant has to get the paperwork right, and say about 91 words (I’ve just counted them), the bride and groom say the 19 words each in their marriage vows and it’s all over.

Some downsides come with this flexibility.

Tradition is tradition for a reason, and in my experience it is necessary to pay some attention to tradition when planning a ceremony. After all, it is supposed to be a ceremony.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my life was when I was 18 and a friend of mine was killed. I and another 18 year old (yes 18) planned and executed his funeral.

It was a sanitised affair. The big mistake we made is that we did not allow people to grieve, in fact we made it difficult for them to express any emotion. We just didn’t understand.

Looking back it was a disastrous error, brought about by our lack of life experience.

So what’s this got to do with weddings?  I hear you ask.

Well, people have to be able to experience joy and all the other emotions that come with one of the most significant days in a person’s life  – “people” includes the family and friends.

The design and execution of the ceremony has a lifetime effect, an effect that lasts long after the flowers have faded, the wedding dress no longer fits, and the kids have left home.

The other important point to make is that the ceremony is the first thing that happens in the day, sets the tone, and releases the energy for the whole day.

As I often remind brides, “They say that you should have your second marriage first, at least you would know what you are up for.”

One of the current challenges of the Celebrant Profession is to get brides to understand the importance of employing a Celebrant who can really deliver the goods.

Even better if the Celebrant can perform in an integrated manner with the other professionals involved, like the Wedding Planner, the Videographer and the Photographer.

The Celebrant has to perform certain actions in order for the marriage to be legal, but beyond that, the ceremony is all theatre. It’s a show.

I can see that a top class Celebrant should think of themselves as being a focal point of a team effort – and do as much as they can to make sure that the ceremony they design will be the ceremony that is reflected in the media record.

For example, I have recently changed the way that I get the bride and the person giving her away to walk down the aisle in order to give a smoother transition and a better effect in the video.

In my experience, Troy is the only videographer who has ever given me feedback about a ceremony that I performed – and I was surprised when this was the first time that this has happened.

The Celebrant has to deliver the goods but maybe you don’t realise how much flexibility the Celebrant has to help you similarly deliver the goods.