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February 8th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
Steve Doughty
Last updated at 12:14 AM on 8th February 2012
A white wedding in church will cost couples £1,000 or more after the Church of England announced a thumping increase in its fees today.
The 40 per cent increase in the fees paid to the Church for staging a wedding means a bride and groom will from next year face a bill of £415 just for staging the ceremony.
The price will not even cover the full costs of the church. A further fee for the services of the verger and another bill for heating the church will come extra.
Ecclesiastical expenses: The cost of a Church of England wedding will from next year reach the £1,000 mark. (Picture posed by models)
By the time a bride has opted for an
organist, a choir, bellringers and flowers the price of her church
ceremony is certain to have topped the £1,000 mark.
Under
new fees approved by the Church’s parliament, the General Synod,
funerals too will go up, in some cases by more than 50 per cent.
The new fees were set in the wake of the first increase in numbers of church weddings in eight years.
White
church weddings went up by four per cent, according to figures last
month, after new rules allowed more couples to marry in a church of
their choice rather than their closest parish church.
When
greatly increased fees for Church of England ceremonies were first
suggested last year, CofE leaders said they would mean an end to
‘Ryanair’ weddings in which couples faced bills for an endless stream of
extras.
But the Ryanair
principle has now crept in again, so a couple who pay the new fees will
still face charges for extras they cannot avoid, such as the services of
the verger and the bill for heating the church.
The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Right Reverend John Packer, told the Synod: ‘There may be some modest increase in the overall fee income of the Church of England as a result of the proposed fee levels.’
He added: ‘Overall fee income probably
contributes around £35million to running the Church of England, of
which around £15million goes to the cost of stipends.’
The stipend or salary recommended by the Church for a vicar is £22,180 a year. The new fee system, however, will charge couples for the services of clergy at a rate equivalent to £47,320 a year.
The fee for a wedding will go up from £296 to £415, a price which includes the reading of the banns for three Sundays in advance of the ceremony and a certificate to show the banns have been read.
The increase of just over 40 per cent is nearly 10 times the current rate of inflation according to the Consumer Prices Index, the measure favoured by the Treasury.
The £415 includes the time of clergy,
prices at £22.75 an hour, and a further £32.75 an hour for use of church
buildings. But the verger and the heating bill come extra.
Many couples will also wish to have an
organist, likely to charge between £100 and £150, and sometimes double
that if the wedding is being filmed.
FEE CHANGES ‘NOT INTENDED AS NEW INCOME STREAM’, CLAIMS BISHOP
A new fee system to cover weddings and funerals was designed last year, after lawyers discovered a glitch in ecclesiastical wedding law which meant the Church needed to pass new regulations through Parliament.
A new fee system has now been approved at Westminster, but the scale of the fees was not made public until today.
Bishop Packer, above, said: ‘We really do need to make some progress. The figures have emerged out of a process of seeking to establish some reasonably consistent relationship to the actual costs incurred by the Church at diocesan and parish levels in providing authorised ministry.
‘These figures are all arrived at in a similar way, with the same assumptions about costs underlying them. These assumptions include, broadly speaking, £22.75 an hour for authorized ministry, and £32.75 an hour for the use of buildings. The figures are based on a fair amount of discussion and research.’
The bishop said: ‘There may be some modest increase in the overall fee income of the Church of England as a result of the proposed fee levels. But there are so many variables that it is hard to be absolutely sure and in any event these proposals are not, and were never intended to be, a means of creating significant new income overall.’
A choir may be another £100 or more, and a similar bill must be paid for bellringers. Flowers are a further cost on top.
A funeral service will go up from £102 to £160, and a funeral including burial in the churchyard from £298 to £420.
The price hikes come at a time when numbers of weddings in the country are at a historic low.
Church weddings dropped to just 56,700 in 2009 as many couples chose the alternative of a civil ceremony in ‘approved premises’ such as a stately home.
But numbers went up in 2010 to 58,700 as the reforms which allowed couples a much wider choice of churches took effect.
Manchester Synod member the Reverend Canon Simon Killwick said the fee increases would turn couples against marriage in church.
‘Such a fee increase seems to me hard to justify in times of financial austerity and even harder to justify in poor inner-city parishes, ‘he said.
‘The Church of England ought not to be seen to be making a big increase at this time and ought not to be making it difficult for the poor to access these services at a time when a simple ceremony can be had at a register office for around £100.’
He warned that the Church of England could not rely on the power of vicars to waive fees in cases of hardship.
‘That places the clergy in the invidious position of attempting to means test parishioners and people do talk. The poor don’t want to be patronised by fees being waived, they want their church to be affordable to them.
‘It would be a crying shame if poor people end up being married in register offices because the Church of England has priced them out of their parish church.’
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Not long ago, I went to a hotel beach gazebo wedding in Cuba, the actual wedding costs to the couple came to less £550, and this included flowers, photo,s cake, wine, a Cuban 7 man instrument band, and just about everything else associated with a wedding, and at £1200 all inclusive for 2 weeks, it wasn’t a bad price either, and represented a honeymoon for the couple.
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The arithmetic seems odd: marriage service less than an hour so clergy £23 and building use £33 comes only to £56, so what is the extra £359? Profit?
It’s our 50th anniversary this year, I must ask the Rector what it would cost to renew our vows. Perhaps we might just slip into a church (not the parish one they lock it up) and just repeat them to each other on the day.
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36 years ago my Dad gave us a choice between a white wedding or a deposit on a house. We chose the house and although it would have been nice to have had a church wedding it was the vows that counted not the trappings. We made the right choice. Thanks Dad.
– anne, feltham, 7/2/2012 20:31 ———————————————————————————————————————————- I’m sure you can’t be saying that it’s a church wedding or a deposit on a house – £1000 isn’t much of a deposit on a house is it!
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I think I will leave instructions for an extra big barby in the garden with the ashes ploughed back in for the runner beans!
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For balance (if the DM knows what the word means) you should have reported the cost of a comparable alternative, getting married in a historic house or hotel – Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham charges £760 for an hour and a half, registrar £330 weekdays, £385 Saturdays, so more than a thousand pounds with no flowers, bells or choir.Comparable church wedding half this. If you go to a hotel they will insist on catering too at wedding prices. Yet another non story.
– TonyB, Melbourne, Australia, 7/2/2012 ***************************
You’ve missed the point Tony. The other venues you mention are commercial establishments – their very reason for being is to make money. The “Church” is supposed to be a place of worship which abides by scriptural law. Therefore the fact that they charge worshippers for ‘services rendered’ IS a story. Aren’t these the very type of people Jesus threw out of the temple – those who would make money out of a supposed house of God?
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Time to covert to Catholicism then!!
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I think you should be made to wear a crucifix for the rest of your life, eat flesh and drink blood every weekend. That’ll put most intelligent people off using a church service!
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God gives to those that take.
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I wonder how many people ‘use’ the church for their wedding?? Are they believers, followers of Christ, Christians or just people wanting to use the church for their big day. If you want to ‘use’ the services then sorry, you DO have to pay!
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I wonder if you get a discount for booking a wedding and a funeral at the same church
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