Albert N. Martin served for forty-six years from 1962 to 2008 as pastor of Trinity Baptist Church of Montville, New Jersey. His teaching ministry is known for thorough and powerful exposition of God’s Word. Today he serves in writing and conference ministry from his home in Michigan. Personally, he is one of my favorite preachers. The Banner of Truth introduces him as follows: (After his retirement) “he and his second wife Dorothy relocated to Michigan (he lost his first wife Marilyn in 2004 after 48 years of marriage and a six-year battle with cancer). A recognized evangelist, counsellor, pastor and preacher, Al Martin had his first experience of street preaching before the age of eighteen, under the guidance of elders at the Mission Hall he attended. He taught all the courses in Pastoral Theology in the Trinity Ministerial Academy for 20 years until it closed in 1998. In his ‘retirement’, he is now working to put these lectures into permanent DVD format, as well as having several writing projects in the pipeline. Al Martin is the author of four booklets published by the Trust – A Life of Principled Obedience, Living the Christian Life, The Practical Implications of Calvinism, and What’s Wrong with Preaching Today?” Now, listen to him carefully.

It has been my privilege to officiate at scores of weddings during the course of more than fifty years of ministerial labor. Some of the most joyous moments in my years of pastoral experience occurred during my participation in many of those weddings. During the last few years of those labors, however, I underwent a growing measure of uneasiness concerning certain discernible trends that were evident in the weddings I was asked to conduct.

As I expressed this uneasiness to my fellow pastors with whom I labored in the oversight of Trinity Baptist Church of Montville, New Jersey, it soon became clear that I was not alone in my concerns. My fellow pastors asked me to draft a brief manual that they would eventually modify, edit, and ultimately approve. We would then present this material as an official pastoral guideline to any couple desiring to have their wedding conducted in our church building by one of the pastors of Trinity. It was our united conviction that this course of action would help both the pastors and the engaged couple conscientiously to pursue plans for a wedding ceremony that would indeed illustrate and validate the truth of God, bring a maximum measure of glory to God, and elicit unmingled joy among the gathered people of God. Furthermore, we judged that this course of action would help us in the future to avoid some of the shame and embarrassment that we had experienced in conducting some more recent weddings. This booklet contains a slightly modified version of the product of our joint labors.

Since leaving my pastoral responsibilities at Trinity in June 2008, I have become increasingly convinced that the biblical principles and counsels contained in that manual should be available to a wider audience. This conviction forced me to wrestle with the question of whether I should rework the material in the manual in order to make certain parts of it less direct and less specific. I decided that there was value in retaining the essential content and form of the original manual for two reasons. First, following this course would allow me to maintain the ethos of the direct address with which we as pastors were seeking to minister to the couples within our own assembly. Second, it is my desire that by retaining this form of addressing these issues I would perhaps provide a viable model for pastors desiring to give scriptural, loving, and specific pastoral guidance to their people concerning this and similar issues.

According to Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 3:15, churches have been constituted by God as “the pillar and ground of the truth.” In other words, the church is to confess and embody in the totality of its corporate life the saving truth of God in Jesus Christ as recorded in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Within the framework of this concern, we must recognize that the wedding services conducted in our churches either validate and hold forth in clarity the truth of the gospel, or they erode and compromise the truth of the Word of God, either in its objective doctrinal content or in its inevitable practical application to life. It will become evident to the reader of this booklet that it is my conviction that many current trends in the wedding practices among evangelical Christians are not contributing to this vital function of the church as “the pillar and ground of the truth.” As is true in so many areas of current church life, nothing but thorough biblical reformation will once again cause the truth of the gospel to shine with penetrating brilliance before the eyes of men. Remember the simple axiom: We are never more effective in winning the world than when we are most unlike the world.

This foreword and the text at the end of the manual designated as a postscript are entirely my own composition. I have submitted the material in both sections to those men with whom I previously formally labored in order to obtain their counsel concerning what I have written. The initial draft has also undergone the helpful scrutiny and critical eyes of other respected, experienced, mature, and discerning men of God. For their in- put, I am grateful. However, while the manual itself (in a minimally edited form) is the joint product of the entire eldership of Trinity Baptist Church, I bear complete responsibility for the material that precedes and follows the reproduction and slightly modified edition of the manual.

It will soon be evident to the reader that I have written this booklet with a particular focus upon the religious and cultural wedding practices common in the United States. However, should these pages be found in the hands of Christians in other national and cultural settings, I trust that the Biblical precepts and principles will be embraced from the heart. Then, as those Biblical precepts and principles are wisely integrated into mor- ally neutral local cultural and religious traditions, the results will be wedding practices that are culturally sensitive but practices in which the truth of God will be patent and by which the gospel will be powerfully validated and illustrated.

Any or all of the contents of the manual may be adapted and copied for distribution to others. All I request is a simple acknowledgment that this booklet was the source of the material used, along with an explanation of how to obtain the booklet.

May God be pleased to use these few pages to challenge many couples (and their pastors) to a radical rethinking of what is involved in a truly Christian wedding.

—Albert N. Martin; Jenison, Michigan; 2012

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