By Mollee Francisco 

Weddings are always memorable moments for those most intimately involved. But what about for those who conduct the weddings? What moments stick out to them?

To help celebrate Valentine’s Day, the Herald asked local pastors to share their most memorable wedding moments from ceremonies they’ve conducted over the years.

My first wedding

“Twenty-four- years- old and one month out of seminary, I performed my first wedding. Nothing in the seminary had prepared me for this. Marriage preparation, I had been taught, was the key to every successful marriage and we were responsible to prepare every couple carefully.

“But the couple who came to the 24-year-old pastor, whose vast experience of marriage included one month of marriage, was an 89-year-old groom and an 86–year-old bride. They had been high school sweethearts but had long ago had left their love behind.

“Each had married someone else. After long successful marriages, their spouses had died, and they had re-discovered each other with the fresh love and affection of lost lovers.

“I did no marriage counseling! We met in the chapel with two other witnesses – their respective son and daughter. Before we began, the groom whispered, “Keep it short! We don’t have long. Besides, we just want to get to the kiss!” BOY, did those two kiss! God love ‘em!!!”

Gordon Stewart

Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church

Hog-wild

Al Lenius was officiating at a large formal wedding where the bride had a “nice dress” with a lot of “flouncy stuff on it.” He remembers that the wedding party was very much “Harley Davidson people.”

After the wedding, they planned to ride from the church to their home where the reception was to be held. Everyone got on their Harleys including the bride in her fancy dress. To keep the dress from flying up, they had to use bungee cords to tie her down.

Al Lenius

Officiate; former pastor Chaska Moravian Church

Five-alarm

“I was presiding at a wedding for a nice young couple. We arrived that the part of the service where the pastor asks, “Does anyone have any objection to this marriage? Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

“At that moment, the father of the bride stood up and walked to the front of the church. I immediately braced myself for what could only be a very tense and awkward moment.

“To my surprise, he walked right past me. He went straight to the candelabra and calmly patted out some flames on flowers that had caught on fire from the candles.

“After the flames were extinguished, he turned, looked at me and said, ‘Well, I am a fire department volunteer and I don’t want to have to respond to a call at my daughter’s wedding.’ He returned to his seat and we went forward with the service...”

Tom Biatek

Discovery United Methodist Church

Tractor-pull wedding

One winter, Lenius was asked to conduct a wedding in North Dakota where “it snows a lot.” On this particular day, they were having a winter storm and while the guests had braved the elements to get to the church on time, the bride and groom were not so lucky.

They had got stuck in a ditch on their way to the wedding. Lenius recalls having to send out tractors to get them out of the ditch so they could get on with the wedding.

Al Lenius

Quack! Quack! Quack!

“The setting was a wooded city park in Wooster, Ohio, where I served as college pastor at The College of Wooster. The wedding party and I stood on a point surrounded on three sides by water.

“‘Barry, will you have Shirley to be your wedded wife and will you pledge yourself to her, in all love and service, in all faith and tenderness … so long as you both shall live?’

“‘Quack! Quack! Quack!’

“The ducks had made their way around the bend and had answered for the groom! Same question to the bride, “Shirley, will have Barry….”

“The bride answered, “I will”; the ducks, like a Greek chorus in Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite,” rang out the mocking refrain: “Quack! Quack! Quack!”

“When it came time to speak their vows – written in the language by star-gazing lovers with no hint of the traditional vows ‘in trouble and in sorrow, in sickness and in health’ – the ducks added their Monty Python voice from beginning to end: ‘Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! Sure! Sure! Sure! Yadda! Yadda! Yadda!’ 

“Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, they fell silent and disappeared around the bend.”

Gordon Stewart

Through good times and bad

Lenius received a call once to do a wedding in Appleton, Minn., out near the South Dakota border. Appleton is the home of one of Minnesota’s state prisons and that was to be the location of the event.

The inmate registered Lenius as one of his guests and Lenius arrived to be frisked by security.

When he had finally passed through, he was greeted by the bride and groom who were seated on opposite sides of a table.

“They couldn’t touch, couldn’t kiss, couldn’t even exchange rings, but we had a wedding,” said Lenius.

Lenius figures he has conducted more than 600 weddings in his lifetime, but that was his one and only prison wedding.

Al Lenius

“I Will”

“The wedding took place in the large living room of the Ecumenical Campus Ministry Center at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Father Charlie Wester and I, Catholic and Protestant campus ministers, co-officiated.

“Because the bride and groom were from Christian traditions more like the Hatfields and the McCoys and because the wedding service was a hybrid of the two traditions, we had distributed a printed script of the entire liturgy. The parts spoken by Charlie or me were printed in regular type. The parts to be spoken by the bride, the groom, or the congregation were in BOLDED CAPS.“

Father Charlie and I had agreed that the congregation would need strong leadership. To that end, we had agreed that when Charlie was serving as the officiant, I would lead the congregation in their bold print responses and visa versa.

“All went well until I asked the groom ‘Will you have ______ to be your wedded wife, and will you pledge yourself to her, in all love and service, in all faith and tenderness, to live with her and cherish her, according to the ordinance of God in the holy bond of marriage,’ at which point, Father Charlie’s voice rang out: ‘I WILL!’

“I looked over at Charlie. Charlie put his hand to his mouth, looked over at me, then at the groom, the bride and the congregation, and said, ‘Oops!’”

Gordon Stewart

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