Celebrants write and perform more ceremonies than just weddings, funerals, and naming ceremonies. We at Choice Celebrant Training refer to different kinds of ceremonies as life events.
What is a Life Event Ceremony?
When celebrancy became a job role, somebody somewhere determined celebrants mainly learnt how to write and perform just a handful of ceremonies. The same theme as traditional ceremonies held in a place of worship. Naming ceremonies without the religion of Christenings, weddings without the religion or lawful recognition of marriages, renewal of vows without the religious blessings and funerals without religion. Celebrants can include religion if requested by their clients. With or without religion, celebrants have the capability to offer more than these four ceremonies, but many aren’t taught how to write a range of life event ceremonies.
A life event ceremony is the collective name for all ceremonies including weddings, funerals, and naming ceremonies. There are over 25 different ceremonies minimum that a wedding and funeral celebrant can write and lead, with more available for alternative celebrants.
Life event ceremonies can be for an individual person, a family, a group of friends, business partnerships or sole traders. They include:
Naming ceremonies for babies, teens, and adults
Commitment ceremonies
Engagement
Anniversary
Divorce
Retirement
New home
Family unity ceremonies
Job promotion
Bon Voyage
Graduation
New job
Age milestone ceremonies
Any ceremony created to mark an achievement
There are many more too and those who join our Life Events Celebrant Training Course choose which category of life events they want to learn about.
Naming Ceremony Training
Most wedding celebrants are taught how to create and narrate naming ceremonies as part of their wedding celebrant training, why? They aren’t taught how to do the other traditional ceremony of funerals (unless they train to also be a funeral celebrant), so why are they taught how to write a naming ceremony which is a different kind of ceremony and have nothing to do with weddings?
Funeral celebrants learn about funerals, memorials, and other death related ceremonies only, so why do wedding celebrants learn about naming ceremonies with traditional wedding celebrant training?
Many of our Choice Celebrant Community Celebrants state they did not want to learn how to create and narrate naming ceremonies as they wouldn’t be offering these kinds of ceremonies. Others who have joined our Celebrant Refresh Course have divulged they felt the naming ceremony part of their course wasn’t as intense as the wedding training, leaving them with forgotten or not enough training in this area of celebrancy.
Our naming ceremony training isn’t just about babies either. Trainee celebrants can choose to learn how to create naming ceremonies for teens and adults. People change their names for many reasons including:
After a divorce
New partnership who have changed their name
They are trans
They are non-binary
They are bigender or genderfluid
Family unity
Adoption
They want to take on a new name
They take a magickal Pagan name
Larpers or cos-players
Naming ceremonies can also be for houses and boats.
The Importance of Ceremony
Every wedding and/or funeral celebrant we train is trained to be a ceremonialist. Ceremonialists are professional writers, they hold space, create individualised ceremonies which have been crafted to be unrepeated again. Ceremonialists understand about the importance of emotion and ritual; know where during the ceremony unity ceremonies should be placed for relevance and match every unity ceremony with their clients needs rather than expecting their clients to choose from a limited list on offer.
Ceremonies are important in marking and celebrating a milestone in a relationship or a stage within a life. Funerals mark the end of a life and when written by a funeral celebrant, they should be called funeral ceremonies, not services as they are incorrectly referred to, putting them in a similar category to traditional religious funerals.
There are too Many Celebrants
‘There are too many celebrants’, ‘the market is flooded’ are two statements about celebrants and made by celebrants, heard a lot. Both statements are incorrect. There may be a lot of celebrants in certain areas all trying to gain business from the same funeral directors. There may be lots of wedding celebrants, but how many have considering trying to gain business in other areas of celebrancy than funerals and weddings? Because most celebrants are only trained in weddings, naming ceremonies and funerals, this has limited their options for the kinds of ceremonies they can offer.
With the right training, celebrants can create any style, theme, and kind of ceremony.
Choice Celebrant Training; Progressive Celebrant Training
To our knowledge, we are currently the only celebrant training company (at the time of writing this blog, 1st August 2023), to offer a separate life events celebrant training module. ‘If you can create one style of ceremony you can use that as a template to create others’ has been heard many times but that is incorrect.
Different ceremonies require different styles of writing, appropriate unity ceremonies and rituals. Simply adding poems and readings and expecting clients to choose one of the same commonly taught unity ceremonies isn’t enough.
Established, newly qualified and trainee celebrants should feel confident and knowledgeable in the offering, marketing, creation, and delivery of all ceremonies. (We strongly advise celebrants to train as wedding and funeral celebrants before they offer and write these ceremonies).
We hope this blog influences others to offer a similar course. As training companies we all have the same goal; to train celebrants to the best of our ability.
We are called Choice Celebrant Training because we offer the choice of what trainee celebrants want to learn, and they are given the opportunity to choose their Celebrant Trainer. Learning how to write a naming ceremony doesn’t come as standard for our trainee wedding celebrants; only their choice comes as standard.
Modern celebrants should be taught to create more than a few ceremonies. They are the future of celebrancy, and there are more ceremonies to create than weddings, renewal of vows, naming ceremonies, and funerals.
Blog by Choice Celebrant Training