New to This
Some people come to us already serving — as pastors, chaplains, missionaries — and want to add weddings and funerals to work they already do. You may be arriving from the other direction: this is the thing you want to build.
Everyone ordained through Celebrating Life Ministries holds exactly the same standing. The same ordination, the same registration with the Office of the Registrar General, the same authority to perform marriages anywhere in Ontario.
We do not rank people by how they arrived. Serving families at the crossroads of life is a calling and a gift, not a credential — and if you have never stood at the front of a room but have always suspected this is what you were for, you belong here as much as anyone.
What differs is only what has to be supplied. Someone who has been in ministry twenty years already has the pastoral skill and the room presence; they need the legal grounding. Starting from the beginning, you need that and the craft with it.
The simplest test is whether you will be advertising. If you are going to have a website, listings and marketing — if you want people who do not know you to be able to find you — then you are building a practice, and this is the path for you.
What that path includes
Ordination and authorization, and then everything else.
Full training in consultation and ceremony. The templates and scripts we use ourselves. Coaching calls. The working resources you cannot build a practice without — because starting from nothing takes considerably more than a registration number.
Become An Officiant is a ministry extension of Celebrating Life Ministries. Same organization, same ordination, same authorization — a separate site because the two paths need to explain very different things, and putting both on one site left everybody confused.
There you will find the training itself: what is covered, when it runs, what it costs, and how to register. Everything on this site about beliefs, values, ordination and authorization applies to you exactly as written.
Two things worth reading first, because agreement with both is required of every member regardless of path:
And if you are not certain which path is yours, write to Wayne at wayne@celebratinglifeministries.ca and describe what you are doing now. It is a short conversation and it saves a great deal of guessing.