The Wedding Ceremony Planner: Everything You Need for the Perfect Do-It-Yourself Wedding Ceremony

I loved this book even though I'm not the intended audience at all. The author is a Christian pastor, we are atheists. The author says you should hire a professional officiant, we had my aunt do it. But we just basically ignored the preface and found the rest of the book very useful! She explains each part of the ceremony very clearly and includes a lot of wording options. Some are spiritual, some are secular, some use flowery language, some are plainspoken. Of all the websites and books I checked I did not find better wording options anywhere. Reading through all of the options was really helpful to see what things we absolutely did not want, vs what resonated with us. In the end, we started with a base of her words, and changed them or re-wrote parts until it felt like our words. This book gave us a really important foundation to build upon, and that was just what we needed.

A couple of years ago, my niece asked me to officiate her wedding. She waited until 6 weeks prior, but I could not turn her down. I had never done one and I had no idea what to do! This book helped me through a very stress-filled time buy giving me a wealth of information. Some of the people at the wedding actually thought that I was a pro because of the attention to detail. A few months ago, my daughter was engaged and asked if I would perform her ceremony. Once again, this book is off of the shelf and on my desk. Best of all, I had e-mailed Dr. Johnson a question today and I had my answer from her within hours!

This book has been invaluable to us as we create our wedding ceremony for this summer. Would recommend highly.

This book is very helpful when planning a wedding. I used it conjunction with the officant's guide book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1452119015?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage This book has tons of examples to help create the ceremony. I created a draft for the bride and groom, and loaned them this book with some samples selected so they could pick and choose for what worked for them. This helped and also inspired them to know what they really wanted. I'd recommend this for an officiant or a couple who is not sure what they want yet but they want to ensure the ceremony is meaningful to them.

I found this book extremely helpful. We also needed a ceremony without any God references, and this got us 95% of the way there. We mixed and matched sections, revamped a couple sentences that still included the "G" word, incorporated personal vows and readings and - ta da - a personal ceremony with just 2 evenings' work. Our most frequent compliment from guests was how personal and meaningful the ceremony was. "A two kleenex-er", according to one guest. Most importantly, it was meaningful and sacred for us, and 100% true to our beliefs. Well worth the effort.

This was actually really useful. Like previous posters, I agree that there is a slight religious bend, but we were able to get enough from it. It was great to be able to download the worksheets, so I could send them to our officiant who is not a professional officiant. There was also some good general advice that helped us in planning not just the ceremony but the entire plans for the day.

This book proved extremely helpful as my now-husband and I were having a friend officiate our wedding and so we were starting from scratch and had to build our ceremony from the ground up. We ended up taking some of the passages from the book and personalizing them to add our customized flair. We received so many compliments after the ceremony (I'm sure this is in large part to how well our friend officiated!), and I know the well-written passages added so much meaning to the event and were different than a cookie-cutter ceremony.

We must not be the intended audience for this book, because, although we are indeed planning my wedding, we didn't find it particularly helpful. Being a atheist/agnostic combo who live in the Godless wilderness that is San Francisco, and who are planning a nontraditional wedding, we were at sea with this book. The book carries several assumptions which are not true for myself and my partner, which made the tone (of course your wedding will be deeply religious/spiritual, of course you wouldn't want people diminishing the sanctity of the ceremony by drinking alcohol during it, etc.) a touch off-putting. It is quite lengthly, and written in a slow, thorough style which would suit many readers quite well, but I found hard to scan, and the lack of an index made it difficult to find specific info. I think this book will be fine for many folks, especially those who are religious, but it didn't serve my needs.

When I bought this book, I really did not fully appreciate how deceptively simple a Wedding Ceremony could be. The author breaks everything down into comprehensive and user-friendly information, and provides many options for various sections of a ceremony. She does this in a way that is open-minded to each couple's very specific circumstances, and she uses language that leaves one filling inspired to write a ceremony, rather than overwhelmed. Judith Johnson's "The Wedding Ceremony Planner" simply makes writing or collaborating a Wedding Ceremony less daunting. I would recommend this book to anyone who has two thumbs, is planning a wedding, and learns well through reading.

This is a fantastic and detailed book that helped my wife and me plan out our ceremony. Judith was a tremendous help in creating our special ceremony and we received so many compliments on how beautiful it was. I highly recommend this book to any officiant and/or individuals planning a ceremony.

I loved this book even though I'm not the intended audience at all. The author is a Christian pastor, we are atheists. The author says you should hire a professional officiant, we had my aunt do it. But we just basically ignored the preface and found the rest of the book very useful! She explains each part of the ceremony very clearly and includes a lot of wording options. Some are spiritual, some are secular, some use flowery language, some are plainspoken. Of all the websites and books I checked I did not find better wording options anywhere. Reading through all of the options was really helpful to see what things we absolutely did not want, vs what resonated with us. In the end, we started with a base of her words, and changed them or re-wrote parts until it felt like our words. This book gave us a really important foundation to build upon, and that was just what we needed.

A couple of years ago, my niece asked me to officiate her wedding. She waited until 6 weeks prior, but I could not turn her down. I had never done one and I had no idea what to do! This book helped me through a very stress-filled time buy giving me a wealth of information. Some of the people at the wedding actually thought that I was a pro because of the attention to detail. A few months ago, my daughter was engaged and asked if I would perform her ceremony. Once again, this book is off of the shelf and on my desk. Best of all, I had e-mailed Dr. Johnson a question today and I had my answer from her within hours!

This book has been invaluable to us as we create our wedding ceremony for this summer. Would recommend highly.

This book is very helpful when planning a wedding. I used it conjunction with the officant's guide book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1452119015?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage This book has tons of examples to help create the ceremony. I created a draft for the bride and groom, and loaned them this book with some samples selected so they could pick and choose for what worked for them. This helped and also inspired them to know what they really wanted. I'd recommend this for an officiant or a couple who is not sure what they want yet but they want to ensure the ceremony is meaningful to them.

I found this book extremely helpful. We also needed a ceremony without any God references, and this got us 95% of the way there. We mixed and matched sections, revamped a couple sentences that still included the "G" word, incorporated personal vows and readings and - ta da - a personal ceremony with just 2 evenings' work. Our most frequent compliment from guests was how personal and meaningful the ceremony was. "A two kleenex-er", according to one guest. Most importantly, it was meaningful and sacred for us, and 100% true to our beliefs. Well worth the effort.

This was actually really useful. Like previous posters, I agree that there is a slight religious bend, but we were able to get enough from it. It was great to be able to download the worksheets, so I could send them to our officiant who is not a professional officiant. There was also some good general advice that helped us in planning not just the ceremony but the entire plans for the day.

This book proved extremely helpful as my now-husband and I were having a friend officiate our wedding and so we were starting from scratch and had to build our ceremony from the ground up. We ended up taking some of the passages from the book and personalizing them to add our customized flair. We received so many compliments after the ceremony (I'm sure this is in large part to how well our friend officiated!), and I know the well-written passages added so much meaning to the event and were different than a cookie-cutter ceremony.

We must not be the intended audience for this book, because, although we are indeed planning my wedding, we didn't find it particularly helpful. Being a atheist/agnostic combo who live in the Godless wilderness that is San Francisco, and who are planning a nontraditional wedding, we were at sea with this book. The book carries several assumptions which are not true for myself and my partner, which made the tone (of course your wedding will be deeply religious/spiritual, of course you wouldn't want people diminishing the sanctity of the ceremony by drinking alcohol during it, etc.) a touch off-putting. It is quite lengthly, and written in a slow, thorough style which would suit many readers quite well, but I found hard to scan, and the lack of an index made it difficult to find specific info. I think this book will be fine for many folks, especially those who are religious, but it didn't serve my needs.

When I bought this book, I really did not fully appreciate how deceptively simple a Wedding Ceremony could be. The author breaks everything down into comprehensive and user-friendly information, and provides many options for various sections of a ceremony. She does this in a way that is open-minded to each couple's very specific circumstances, and she uses language that leaves one filling inspired to write a ceremony, rather than overwhelmed. Judith Johnson's "The Wedding Ceremony Planner" simply makes writing or collaborating a Wedding Ceremony less daunting. I would recommend this book to anyone who has two thumbs, is planning a wedding, and learns well through reading.

This is a fantastic and detailed book that helped my wife and me plan out our ceremony. Judith was a tremendous help in creating our special ceremony and we received so many compliments on how beautiful it was. I highly recommend this book to any officiant and/or individuals planning a ceremony.

I could never have performed my first wedding without this book! The happy couple and I poured over all the magnificent choices for wording, agenda, tone, who-does-what and selected those things that were appropriate for the kind of wedding we had in mind. We added our own touches, but without Judith's abundant and loving information, we'd have been lost! Turns out the wedding was very very sweet -- tears of joy all around!

This book was critical in writing out our ceremony and was so good. We had a family member officiate our wedding so we had to design the entire ceremony. We thought the examples were varried and very helpful. We highly recommend this resource.

Exactly what we needed. We wanted to put together our own non-religious wedding ceremony and vows but not actually write new content ourselves. We took sections and phrases from all over the book and built our own perfect ceremony. Our wedding would not have been the same without it! If you want to create your own ceremony but want guidance and many options this is the book for you!

The Wedding Ceremony Planner is an excellent resource with many examples of each part of the ceremony. With this book as a guide, you will easily cover many aspects of the ceremony and be able to provide the bride and groom with relevant options and variations to make their wedding day memorable and unique. The book also contains great advice for beginners.

As a wedding officiant, I have purchased many ceremony planning books over the years. This has become my "go to" book, especially for couples who want a more secular (rather than religious) ceremony. I recently purchased the newest edition in the Kindle version, which cimes with downloadable pdf files of the example verbiage for different parts of the ceremony. This makes it easier to email suggestions back and forth to the bride and groom. I can't recommend this book more highly.

This is a great tool for planning your ceremony and getting ideas. It has wording and templates for the ceremony.

Combined with things I found on wedding sites, this was a really great resource to write our entire wedding ceremony from scratch. It's well-organized and gives options for both religious and non-secular weddings, like ours. Our ceremony was perfectly tailored to us, and this book eased a lot of my anxiety about making it that way!

This book was SO SO SO helpful to me when we were writing our ceremony. I loved all the script examples for each part of the ceremony and the thorough explanation of each ceremony part and how they come together. I would recommend this book to anyone writing their own ceremony.

I send this book to all who ask me to officiate. Gives a lot of examples and provides an excellent "stepping off" point for couples that wish to create a ceremony that holds a lot of meaning for them. Also helps with order of service and ceremony-related questions. Recommended.

I'm an ecumenical minister and I've married folks who want the simplest, most basic service, as well as those who desire more depth. Judith Johnson has put together a collection of services, with useful guidelines for other parts of the planning process, that will enable anyone officiating at a wedding-or the bride and groom themselves-to create precisely what they want. Very useful!

Excellent book! This book is a great reference to help anyone who needs to prepare a wedding service. In getting ready for my first act as a wedding officiant, I found it to be very valuable. I know I will use it over and over again. Well worth the purchase!

This book is very helpful for anyone who is writing their own wedding vows and/or planning their wedding ceremony. It is very helpful and has nice spreadsheets that you can use along with it. There were a lot of different aspects that may have been looked over in ceremony planning had we not got this book!

If you are getting married outside of a "traditional" church and are planning a wedding ceremony for yourself or someone else that you want to be unique and meaningful, this book is an excellent resource. It covers all the bases and considers a lot of details you might not have thought of.

I was doing a wedding for a couple with one partner who is an atheist. This was very helptul.

Awesome!

Good book. Great lady

Great, great book if you are planning a wedding ceremony. I also own the hard copy of this. The only thing I don't like about it is that you have to log in online to download the other sample worksheets. That being said, there are tons of sample texts within the actual book.

Good book very helpful ! I wish am able ot download the forms as a word versus pdf file! I will have to learn how to do that!

The book was a wonderful guide to my first time as an officiant. I recommend it highly.

I've officiated a couple weddings now, and this book is phenomenal. Lots of variety to design a personalized ceremony.

great ideas for a non-religious ceremony. We used this book extensively when drafting our ceremony. There is explanation for the different parts of the ceremony and many examples of wording.

As a new celebrant I found this book to be very insightful and used some advice from this book in my first wedding that I officiated at.

Great ideas for planning your own ceremony

I love this book! The best book for Wedding Officiant, anyone that is getting marriage. Ceremonies ideas are excellent.

It was awesome! A simple read with lots of helpful advice and easy references and worksheets to help you stay organized!

I found this book to be very readable and useful. A wonderful resource for those planning a wedding or wedding officiants.

This book was full of new ideas and information that I'd previously not seen. I love the ideas for vows and it's written very clearly. A nice edition to my library of ceremonies

This book has been most helpful, I wish there was something out there like this for all kinds of other special life landmarks!

Wonderful book. And it is a really helpful book for anyone getting engaged. I've given it as a gift several times.

I have found the book helpful, but not as unique as I'd hoped. A fair amount of religious options if that is what you're looking to find.

So much info!!

This book was recommended to me by a a friend who served as Officiant at her niece's wedding. I was asked to do the same, and I found this book very helpful! My niece and I do not live close to each other, so she bought a copy, too, and was able to select text ideas that she liked/did not like so that I could construct a ceremony that was meaningful to them. I do see that some of the negative reviews felt that this guide was directed toward religious ceremonies. My niece and her fiance did not want a religious theme, and we were able to find plenty of appropriate text. The guide also helped me to understand the order of the wedding with many useful tips from someone who had done it all before. Paid coordinators at venues should find this an excellent resource for traditional and non-traditional ceremonies. Definitely worth the price and may also be available at your local library!