One Cheer from Inside the Machine

I'm building a wedding expo.

That's the confession before anything else. The Aisle, at Anniston Museums and Gardens, October 18. Forty vendors. A fashion show. A food truck row on what used to be a community swimming pool. I am, in some technical sense, the wedding industrial complex.

I read Brad East's piece in Christianity Today last week. He's a theology professor in Texas. He knows the critique — the debt, the expectation, parents going broke over one Saturday. He knows it and mostly agrees with it.

But he musters one or two cheers anyway.

His best line is about permission. The industry, for all its faults, gives people permission to want to get married. In a culture that has spent two decades talking young people out of it — too expensive, too risky, too much of a commitment before you've figured out your career — the wedding industry is one of the few places still saying: this is worth wanting. Worth doing in grand style.

I read that and felt something complicated.

I served at Weaver First United Methodist Church for seven years. Candy Sefcik was the trustee chair. She sat near the front, came early, stayed late, and knew things about the building that nobody else knew — which door stuck in the summer, which outlet needed a different breaker, where the folding tables were actually stored versus where they were supposed to be stored.

She called me once to report that someone had painted on the altar table. She'd already cleaned it up. She said we should give thanks for the diversity it represented.

She prayed scripture with me at 6:15 in the morning. Not every week. Every day.

Then there was Evelyn Thompson.

Evelyn Thompson organized the meals. After every Sunday service, after every funeral connected to the church, whenever somebody in the congregation lost a job or a parent or a pregnancy, Evelyn was the one who made sure there was food. The July community meal was weeks away and she was already working on the menu. Hamburgers, hotdogs, sides. Nobody had asked her to start yet. She just had.

She kept the list in her head. She didn't need a spreadsheet.

When East writes about the church ladies who arranged the decorations — the ones who changed your diapers and tied bows on pews — he's writing about Candy and Evelyn. That world.

What he can't quite see from the outside is what was holding them up.

It wasn't just that Candy showed up or Evelyn organized the casseroles. The congregation was behind them. Not just helping with the chairs. Deciding, together, that this marriage mattered to everyone in the room. That a death in the community was everyone's loss. That they had a stake in each other's lives.

That's what makes the casserole different from DoorDash. Not the food. The decision behind it.

When that starts to go — when people stop going to church, or start going somewhere they don't know anyone, or start planning weddings without any community attached to them at all — someone fills the space. Photographers. Planners. Florists with professional websites. Expos like the one I'm putting together.

They fill it imperfectly. So did the church ladies, honestly. Candy could tell you about marriages she watched fall apart. She'd prayed over some of those couples at 6:15am too.

But East is right that the pressure still matters. Someone has to keep saying this day is worth the money. Worth the preparation. Worth marking in public, in front of people who will remember it.

That's what I want The Aisle to say, for this county.

Not cheaper. Not simpler. Not better Instagram than the other expo. Just still connected to what the day is actually for.

East ends his piece with a line I wrote down.

The world may mean it for ill, but God means it for good.

Her name was Anna Allison. She ran the senior center in town. They called me the week of the wedding. Small group. No program. She married Jim Allison in that sanctuary.

They both knew at the time he had cancer.

She married him anyway.

The Aisle is October 18 at Anniston Museums and Gardens. Tickets at theaisle.app.

If you want to know why I built this: The Whole of It.

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