Obits

Is a service at a church necessary?

I have had Christian friend die and no service was held at the church. One reason was our church was too small to hold all those who would attend a service.

 

This is really a pet peeve of mine. I have seen people join a local church and not appear again for the obvioius purpose of having a "legitimate" line printed in their obit. It is beyond belief that someone would be worried about such nonsense compared to their eternal destiny. Also, if there is ever an obit that says "they were a member of the Baptist faith," that usually means they did not belong to a church and probably had not been in decades.

 

You're right in a lot of cases. And, too, sometimes the funeral is at the church because the funeral home chapel is too small.

One should not read anything into what is usually a personal preference.

I work part-time for a funeral home, and since it is uniquely set up for funerals, sometimes it's logistically easier for the family to have everything there.

 

Custom ... over forty years here in the Washington, DC, area I have noticed that many people who are legitimately church members and Christians have funerals in funeral homes. Part of that is cost; the funeral home charges to remove bodies to churches and then on to the cemetery. But I have also noticed a trend toward funerals in churches in recent years; maybe that is because some pastors, myself included, have encouraged that option. I can think of families that were going to stay with a funeral home but accepted my invitation to use the church.

As an organist, too, I surely wanted to keep them from having to endure warbly tremolos from an electronic thingy, played by someone whose repertoire is sentimental blah ... not when I could offer them our Moeller pipe organ and a music professor to play it! And we could provide a choir, too, which is unlikely in a funeral home.

I am simply saying that pastors can encourage a better practice when it is appropriate to do so.

 

On death, my body goes either directly to science or the crematorium. Total cost for science is zero, and otherwise an insurance of $800.00 was prepaid.

If people can't see me before I die, I don't want them standing over my body and saying "How natural he looks!" Especially since I can't answer.

Then, that plain wooden crate wouldn't look nice in the fancy church building.

Cheers,

Jim

 

To use the ultimate oxymoron; I believe the first two weeks of heaven will be chocked full of shockers.

"You're here??? How'd you get here??? Where's *fill in the blank*??? Why isn't *fill in the blank* here???"

IMO, we're gonna be shocked at who's there, and at who's NOT there.

 

IMHO I think you are right. Seems that Mark Twain wrote on this in one of his short stories. Also C. S. Lewis sort of plays on this idea in his "The Great Divorce".

 

I want an outdoor funeral so I can feel the wind in my hair, just keep the buzzards away.

 

Just for example, both of my wifes' grandmothers have died in the past five years. Both funeral services were at Church. Della, who died in January of this year, was however buried in the Church cemetery next door.

 

I guess it makes people feel better. Recently a lady on our prayer list died and her obit said she went home to be with the Lord. She clearly was NOT a Christian and didn't want to be involved with any church. I thought it was strange for the family to put that in her obit.

Another elderly couple in our community died last year and the obits said they were both members of our church. Not true, and the family KNEW it, yet they printed it anyway. Sometimes I wonder if people think "claiming" a church or heaven will make their loved ones saved or something. Weird.

 

I plan to be buried in the family's ancestral plot out of state. I doubt very much the funeral will be held in our church.

 

In my experience, it is often simply a regional preference.

A couple of months into my pastorate in Central Texas, we had an invalid husband of a member die. The widow has already made funeral arrangements months before (although I didn't know that at the time) and I asked if she wanted to have the memorial service at our church facilities. She looked at me like I was coming close to offending her and said, "No, we can afford to have it at the funeral home." I backed off immediately and we continued discussing the funeral arrangements and asked for more information about her husband (I only had the opportunity to visit him 4 or 5 times prior to his death and he was not always lucid when I sat with him).

That evening, I called another Baptist pastor in town that I knew and asked him about funeral customs. He told me that except in very rare cases, people in that region wanted to have funerals in the funeral home chapels. He had served there for more than 20 years and it was that way when he arrived and he never could break the pattern. He seems to think it might have sometime to do with a few local "Churches of Christ" that didn't want their members to enter into other church's places of worship.

In my family, we have always opted for funerals in church facilities except for my maternal grandparents. My maternal grandparents were nominally Roman Catholic. My grandfather was extremely cynical regarding the motives of the priesthood and the RCC's presumed spiritual authority. The only priest that ever impressed him was the priest he knew when they were imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp in Poland. The German priest, a fellow prisoner, spent what little "free" time he had serving other prisoners and providing spiritual instruction. (He was the one who led my mother to faith in Christ - he specifically taught against idolatry and stressed faith in Christ leads to life, not the sacraments.) Through my grandfather's experience with him, he because something of a Baptist in his belief system although he never joined a church after he left Europe. When he was dying, he let it be known he didn't want to have his funeral in the local Roman Catholic church where my grandmother sometimes attended. So his funeral was at a local funeral home.

When my grandmother died, she wanted me to do a portion of her funeral, but the local Catholic church would have nothing of it. She was also much more of a Baptist than a Catholic, but she had been raised in the RCC and felt comfortable with much of the worship although she has some serious doctrinal issues with some aspects of it. The local priests were very unhappy about it, but I did the majority of her funeral service and the priest did the commitment ceremony at the cemetery.

 

I dont understand what you mean Ann. Some people want the service short & perhaps the deceased didnt go to church?

 

The eulogy or service is for the benefit of the remaining who have selected the service usually. People deal with closure differently. I see no problem.

 

As a part-timer at a funeral home, I am seeing more and more ministers spend much of their part of the service preaching the plan of salvation. That's because so many of the audience are unchurched, and will unlike hear the gospel again for a while.

I'm also seeing more and more instances where the deceased has no church affiliation and no pastor. So, a relative's pastor gets the call. Or, the ordained minister on our staff.

In one case a few years ago, I got the call. An elderly member of our church died, no children, no siblings left, only a niece or two from out of town. We were between pastors at the time and somebody suggested the niece call me.

I'm seeing more and more pastors preaching funerals for people they've never met.