The perks of being a church member...

...you get the use of a church for your wedding at no charge. You also get the preacher at no charge.

What do we get for not belonging to a church? Spending lots of money on a place to have the ceremony and spending ~$300 for someone to perform the ceremony. WHAT?!

I knew we'd be paying a pretty penny for a site, but never in my wildest dreams did I think the going rate for an officiant would be $300. It still blows my mind. Of course, you can hire a magistrate and legally, they can't charge anything over $20. You'd probably give them a pretty good tip, but they can't charge you more than $20.

I'm just worried a magistrate won't have the "feel" of a preacher. Which is funny...I want the feel of a preacher but without all the God stuff.

I have a bad feeling about this...I'm going towards a religion discussion and that's a topic (along with politics) that you're not supposed to talk about.

I was baptized Methodist and when I moved here, went to almost all of the Methodist churches around here. I skipped one because it looked REALLY small (it's on the registry of historical places I think). Anyway, I didn't feel connected to any one and determined that it wasn't the churches...it was me.

I've since semi-determined that my place is in the Unitarian Universalist church. I haven't yet attended one, so I don't know for sure, but I feel this is where I'm meant to be. The nearest one to me is in Franklin, however, it's so small they don't have a regular preacher--they have "speakers". And that doesn't appeal to me (I get enough of that at school), so I haven't gone. The next closest is in Asheville, but I haven't yet gotten to where I'm willing to drive 45 minutes to go to church.

The whole point of this post was that I emailed the reverend at the UU church in Asheville about performing our ceremony. He said he normally doesn't do it for non-members, but he'd be willing to do it for us. I wonder what I said in my email that made him take pity on us??

Anyway, after reading his email, I'm really excited about him possibly doing the ceremony. It'll fulfill my vision of a preacher with a liberal religious view. He even stated that he's protesting NC laws that prohibit same-sex marriage by not signing wedding licenses (we'd need a magistrate to sign it). And that makes me even more convinced that he's the man for us!!

His price is $300 as well (negotiable he said), but if we meet with him and like him, I think we'll just suck it up and spend the money.

And that's the story of the search for an officiant.