Celebrate Your Special Day with a Trusted Wedding Celebrant in Whitby

and District

Celebrate Life offers the opportunity for couples whose weddings, by their own choice, take place outside the context of a traditional ceremony in a church, nevertheless, to have their commitment blessed in a personal and unique way. For example, I was privileged to be asked to write and conduct such a ceremony for the first same-sex couple in the UK to take advantage of the 2005 Civil Partnership legislation and have conducted several such ceremonies since. I have also been delighted to write and conduct many more ceremonies for mixed-sex couples following a Register Office ceremony. All these have taken place in a variety of settings – a racecourse, a hotel, a hospice chapel, a forest copse, a hotel’s private chapel, the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, and a formal garden, to name but a few.



Some couples for whom the Church is not a suitable or desirable medium through which they feel able to express such a public commitment now look more widely for a means by which their love can be declared, acknowledged, and celebrated.

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    There are, of course, individual clergy and indeed some churches who, when approached, are welcoming and accommodating with regard to same-sex blessings, or couples where one or both partners have a previous partner living.  However, where any couples feel that their own spiritual position is better understood outside the context of the institutional church, I try to create and offer a ceremony that acknowledges each couple’s spirituality in a non-denominational way. Such ceremonies have no legal nature, of course – that is vested in the civil ceremony itself – but I hope that what we create for the celebration following the legal element captures something of the mystery of divine love shared by each couple and allows them to be enriched and upheld by that which blesses them through the words we choose.


    It would be my intention to see each couple at the least twice before the day itself, first to establish a human link between us and to get to know each other so that we can create something truly individual and unique. That doesn’t mean to say that the service that is created cannot contain traditional and favourite symbols, prayers and blessings – but it also allows for the inclusion of poems and readings from a variety of traditions, and for new material to be used – perhaps something written especially for that couple or that occasion. Rings can be blessed, knots tied, songs sung, petals scattered...there are so many imaginative possibilities.

Fees

My fees include all pre-ceremony visits, contact at any time via phone or e-mail, liaison with the printer (if a service booklet is required) and with organist and/or musicians where appropriate, and a rehearsal – a vital ingredient! I also provide a certificate to mark the event. Please contact me for my current fee.

  • John of Celebrate Life

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About John

I was born in Whitby in 1958, and christened in the chapel at Sneaton Castle. My grandparents were the Holmans of Skinner Street, and my mother served the town for many years as both Town Clerk and Mayoress. She also taught music at Sneaton Castle when it was a school. After attending Whitehall and Fyling Hall Schools, I worked in Hull and Newcastle-upon-Tyne before undertaking theological training in 1983. Ordained in Hereford in 1988, I worked as a minister in the Church of England until 2006. I have served in rural ministry in South Shropshire, and then in Lymington in the New Forest. Having then spent some years with the care of a church in Portsmouth, I moved to Worthing in West Sussex to begin a ministry of almost twelve years as full-time non-denominational hospice chaplain. Calling on some thirty-five years of experience, I now work as an Independent Wedding and Funeral Celebrant, and am a member of the Fellowship of Professional Celebrants. The KSJ that follows my name is because I was created a Knight of Honour of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem (Knights Hospitaller) in Valletta in 2010. I moved back home to Whitby in 2022.