Church weddings

Can you believe that I have never attended a church wedding until last Saturday?

On Saturday, one of my best friends in Hong Kong got married in a church. Which is funny as when I first met him, he wasn't a Christian and I would never have believed he would be the churchgoing sort. In the end though, love proves to be all powerful.

He met a girl who was a Christian. After a couple of years, when they started getting very serious, he started to go to church as well. I'm guessing that his original intention was to let his girlfriend have a church wedding. However, credit where credit is due - he took his duties as a Christian very seriously.

Anyway, having finally been to a church wedding, my final analysis is - I wasn't missing much.

I don't know if this is the norm for church weddings, but for my friends wedding, he had several of the churchs priests handle the ceremony. What followed was a long procession of priests blathering on about Jesus and Christianity (in case its not obvious, I'm not a big believer in religion). As a non-Christian, I found it terribly boring.

Having said that, it wasn't all bad. The main speech was targeted directly at the bride and groom and was in the way of advice for them. This speech was great in that it was obvious that the priest was familiar with both the bride and groom. Very impressive. I can imagine that, in situations like these, its very easy to fall into a standard speech. Instead, the personal nature of the talk made it very heartwarming (and funny to onlookers when she told the groom not to annoy the bride too much!).

Also, the church choir (I call it a choir, but there were ony 4 people) was actually quite good. Most of the songs were in Chinese so I didn't really understand. However, they did a very good rendition of the song - Perhaps Love by John Denver (at least I think it was John Denver).