Photo by Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

The Rev. Kenneth Wright of the First Baptist Church in Gainsboro preaches recently during the funeral service for Addie Andrews.

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Pros& cons

preaching at funerals and weddings

PRO These special sacraments are often better attended than a regular Sunday service.

CON The special attraction isn’t the preacher, but the principles of the event.

PRO People may be in a more spiritual mood than at a regular Sunday service.

CON They have a tacit understanding they’re there to commemorate a marriage or death.

PRO A good sermon could encourage some mourners or wedding guests to make a spiritual commitment.

CON Such commitments can evaporate or even backlash later amid a feeling of being taken advantage of.

PRO A sermon can pay tribute to the faith of the departed or wedding couple.

CON There may be people present who don’t share that faith and might resent the sermonizing.

PRO There’s no telling when any nonchurchgoers may be back in a sanctuary again.

CON They could become even more religiously estranged if they feel browbeaten.

Sources: Various Roanoke-area pastors.

Addie Andrews is in her casket, and the Rev. Kenneth Wright is giving the eulogy, but he's also preaching a sermon to the 250 or so mourners at First Baptist Church in the historic Gainsboro section of Roanoke on a wintery Saturday afternoon. He even urges them to preach a bit, too.

"I want you to turn on your cellphones. Right now. Dial up someone and tell them who you are. I want you to tell them that Jesus died for them, and the preacher said he rose."

Thundering and theatrical, to the discernible delight of many in the congregation, Wright entreats the grievers to go further with their phone ministry by saying: "And if you don't know who Jesus is, well, Sunday is coming."

The veteran pastor's evangelizing is warmly welcomed by the friends and family of Andrews, who was a deaconess and died at age 91. Her late husband, Willie Andrews, was a Baptist minister, and one of her five sons is an associate pastor at Wright's church.

The Rev. Paul Andrews said, "The Gospel should be preached at my mother's funeral. She was born to be a Christian and her life touched many people. This is another way for her to do that."

In an era when church attendance in many denominations is in decline, some pastors see funerals and weddings as increasingly important venues for oratory that can border on revivalism. "The one place nonbelievers will step into a church in our day is at weddings and funerals," said the Rev. Quigg Lawrence, pastor of the Church of the Holy Spirit, an Anglican evangelical congregation in Southwest Roanoke County.

There's plenty of incentive for pastors to try alternative portals through which to woo potential additions to their congregations. Between 1984 and 1998 the percentage of Americans who attend church at least once a month fell to 55 percent from 60 percent, according to a University of Michigan survey -- one of the most recent comprehensive studies on the subject.

Membership in many of the largest denominations has continued downward lately. The Hartford Institute for Religious Research found that in 2006, the ranks of such top 10 groups as Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians fell by a combined total of about 275,000 people, or nearly three times the Roanoke population.

Not only are turnouts often larger for funerals and weddings than for regular Sunday services, pastors say, but the emotionally charged atmosphere of bidding adieu to the deceased or celebrating a couple's new start in matrimony can put people in a spiritual mood. Thus the table is set for them to be served a soul-saving rhetorical banquet.

But some pastors and religious scholars say such services aren't the time or place for saving souls.

"The deepest danger is that such evangelistic efforts violate the tacit nature of such services," said Thomas Long, professor of preaching at Emory University's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta.

People attending weddings and funerals come with the understanding that they are there to witness a marriage or commemorate a loss, he said.

"To change that agreement, that implicit promise, by turning these occasions into revivals, can be a form of ecclesiastical bait-and-switch."

Focusing on the congregation's souls can steer weddings and funerals away from their intended purpose, said Monsignor Joseph Lehman at Our Lady of Nazareth Church, a Catholic parish in Southwest Roanoke County.

"Weddings and funerals are about the principles of those events. We're offering love and prayers for those people. That's why we're there, not to hear me preach, or about the church," he said.

Joyce Mills, a new bride, couldn't agree more. The Roanoke resident wanted to be married in a church by an ordained minister, but with no sermon. The 12-minute ceremony in which she married Mark Pendleton, a co-worker at Kroger, was perfect, she said.

The Rev. Sherwood Spence, a retired Pentecostal preacher who owns Spence's Wedding Chapel in Salem, kept things casual in a recent service with mostly secular philosophy and advice for the couple about getting along. He sprinkled in a brief biblical reference about Adam and Eve as the first married couple and offered a short prayer.

"Just the right amount" of church-related commentary, Mills said afterward. "We didn't want a lot of that."

Although Spence's Wedding Chapel is the site of charismatic services on Sundays, the pastor said, "I don't believe in Sunday-style weddings."

Some pastors say that although a bit of preaching is acceptable, they're wary of a message that puts pressure on guests at weddings or funerals to examine and perhaps affirm their faith then and there. After all, they reason, nonbelievers should be allowed to share grief or joy for loved ones and friends.

George Anderson, pastor of Roanoke's Second Presbyterian Church, said, "Often at weddings and funerals, we have invited guests who are not Christians. They are respectful to the church to sit through a service that is not in their tradition, and I am respectful to them by not issuing a direct invitation that would be judgmental toward their own beliefs."

Consolation, rather than conversion, should be the mission of funerals, said the Rev. Mike Perry of Roanoke Metaphysical Church in Northwest Roanoke. "I'm there to comfort those that are left."

Perry said that, similarly, weddings should be free of preaching and evangelizing.

"Marriage is basically a ritual -- an outer expression of something that's going on within."

But so is the spark of religious faith, and the right time to rekindle it is whenever there's an opening, some pastors say. Chip Roberson, pastor of Cave Spring Baptist Church, says it isn't uncommon for people attending funerals over which he presides to declare new-found faith within view of the casket.

"I always preach at weddings and funerals. That's when some people are ready to listen," he said.

If some attending these sacraments aren't comfortable hearing a sermon, that isn't going to dissuade the Rev. Bryan Smith at First Baptist Church on Third Street in Roanoke. He believes that all pastors will someday have to answer to God on whether they took every chance to spread their faith.

"No pastor will be able to say, 'But Lord, they didn't want me to.' "

During Smith's 21 years of ministering, which have included hundreds of weddings and funerals, he has never failed to preach a sermon, he said. But when it comes to the standard evangelical punchline, extending an invitation for those present to either affirm their commitment to Christ, or make one for the first time, he asks permission ahead of time from the family of the deceased or the wedding couple. He's rarely denied.

"There have been very few times when a family has asked me not to make an invitation for a public response."

Evangelism at funerals and weddings usually stops short of a call to come forward to the altar, partly because that area may occupied by the casket, floral wreaths or the bride, groom and other members of the wedding party.

At the Andrews funeral in Gainsboro, Wright doesn't make an invitation, but he's emphatic that in addition to remembering her, he's preaching a sermon -- and he won't rush it. "A sermon. Not a sermonette. Because sermonettes make Christianettes."

He makes a smooth transition into broadening his message from remembering Andrews into one that's also about the living by focusing not just on her life -- but her faith. The strength and goodness that Wright recalls of Andrews is his springboard into Scripture and oratory about Christ's resurrection.

There are many spontaneous "amens" from around the sanctuary as Wright speaks. During a pause, the strength of one parishioner's reaction rings out loud and clear enough to be widely heard: "You're going to be good Christians when you leave here."

That's exactly what Wright sees as his charge, one that he believes Andrews would endorse. After all, he said, the gospel is a salve to the sorrow and uncertainty that death brings. For those left behind, he said, "Life demands a perfect explanation."