Telling people I'm conducting a 'cross cultural' marriage has been an interesting and learning experience.  Some think it's great, some clearly do not; thankfully no one has cited texts about unequal yokes (yet).  As I've prepared, and reflected, I realise that I have in the last decade or so 'travelled' a long way in my own thinking.

There are ministers who won't marry people who live together.  There are ministers who won't marry people of different ethnicity even if they share the same, active faith.  There are ministers who won't marry people who have been divorced.  There are even, I suspect, ministers who won't marry people who aren't believer Baptised (and certainly a few Anglicans who won't marry people who aren't infant baptised).

Most ministers, though, will quite cheerfully marry couples who have no outward faith commitment of any kind.  Pretty churches and chapels can, it seems, earn lots of money by welcoming all comers to join the conveyor belt (a local church has three on one Saturday this month).  Have we sold out somewhere or are we expressing gospel?

I'm not sure I'd marry anyone, no questions asked, but I'd need to be pretty clear why I was saying 'no.'  Truth is I'd be more likely to say 'no' if I was unsure about the quality of the relationship than on 'ethical' grounds.  If that makes me a hopeless heretic, well, pray for me!

It so happened that the day our couple chose to visit the church we are borrowing coincided with a united service led by our link missionary.  She, with decades of cross cultural experience didn't bat an eyelid at the idea, and said that she was always pleased when someone of another faith wanted to honour that which was good in our own.  Perhaps working in a nation where proselytisation is prohibited, she has learned valuable lessons.

For me, there were many good reasons to say 'yes' to this marriage.

Firstly, I need to say that ethnicity is irrelevant.  In fact it is so irrelevant I don't want to say any more about it. 

Next, the couple wanted to marry.  In an age where there is no requirement for marriage, when they could simply live together, they wanted to make a covenant of commitment (I could waffle about UK marriage law, Biblical silence on marriage, the changing nature of marriage from a landowning and power perspective to 'love-matches' etc, etc, etc but that would be long and boring).  This is a couple who are clearly committed to each other, a relationship that has withstood testing and matured over several years.  In as much as anyone ever does, they seem to have understood what they are entering into.

Then a bit of self-examination.  I would marry a couple with no overt claims of Christian belief, I would also marry a couple when one or both had been previously married, I would marry a couple who were living together, and I think I could marry a 'David and Bathsheba' couple.  Was this case any different?  I don't think so.  Ten years ago I would have been very unsure about this (and probably quite dogmatic), but who am I to say 'no' to a couple who want to enter a covenant tolife-long commitment and, specifically, to do so within an explicitly faith-based context?  And, for the record, it isn't even a pretty church!

It has been challenging to work through forms of words, discerning what I feel a need to retain and what I can let go, whilst still being authentic to my Christian faith.  Recently, as part of our DPT summer school I was reflecting on the minimum I felt needed for a Christian funeral.  One of the tutors, a Methodist, and possibly more sacramentalist than I (not that that's difficult) suggested that my very presence as a sign of the Church achieved this.  It is true that we incarnate (for better or worse) what we believe.  Whether standing in a Baptist chapel and being married by a Baptist minister makes this a Christian marriage, I'm not so sure - to me marriage is not the same thing as the wedding ceremony.  What it does do is to explicitly set the wedding within the compass of faith, and, specifically, Christian faith.

This young couple have many challenges ahead of them - I have tried to encourage them to think carefully about how they will apprach expectations from their parents abourt naming and blessing ceremnoies for any children they may have (praise God we're Baptists in that respect!), and even things like festivals and funerals, which will one day need to be negotiated.

It would be great if, one day, when they are old and grey, they could look back to Saturday and see that it was an important milestone in their life together.  Of course I'd like them to find their own faith in Christ - if I didn't think that was important I wouldn't be a minister, but I also recognise that that is God's task, not mine: my role is to be and speak Good News, a gospel that is not constrained by my own partiality. 

Now we see 'in a glass darkly' - how true.  Three things remain: faith, hope and love.  I hope that God's faithful love is what we demonstrate this Saturday.