American Weddings Blog

Officiating demands a substantial amount of your personal time, effort, thought, consideration - and almost always, love.

So it’s only fair when a new officiant wonders, “How much should I charge for my services?”

The answer in short is this: Officiant fees vary drastically across the country, so you will have to do a bit of research to determine this magical number.

If you are considering performing ceremonies in a professional capacity, you will want to start by looking into what others are charging locally, and proceeding from there.

We recommend doing an online search along the lines of, “Wedding Officiant in [City Name]”. You can also use vendor searches for your area - like looking up Officiants in Wedding Wire's Vendor Search based on location.

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We’re at Wedding MBA in Las Vegas this week, meeting with wedding professionals from across the country and preaching our gospel of online-ordination and wedding ceremony planning. One topic that has come up enough times to warrant a response is the following: are first-time wedding officiants a threat to professional wedding officiants? 

Put another way, when couples ask “Uncle Bob” to officiate their wedding ceremony, does that put professional officiants out of a job? 

The answer is a bit more complex than just yes or no. ...(continued)

Our ministers are the reason that we show up to work every day. Without our ministers, AMM isn’t much more than a few empty desks, a couple of computers, and a coffee machine… 

But when you stand with couples in front of their friends and families, you are preaching our gospel of love and community. You’re reinforcing our values. You bring the magic that transforms weddings into transcendant expressions of love and joy!

That’s why it’s so important to tell your stories, to let others know why AMM exists, and why you chose to get ordained through us to officiate weddings. ...(continued)

Several weeks ago, American Marriage Ministries embarked on an in-person ordination tour across the state of Tennessee, stopping in six cities to offer ordinations in response to the state’s discriminatory marriage law that targeted ministers that were ordained online.

Now that we’re back in Seattle and have had time to collect our thoughts and recover, we want to express our gratitude to the nearly 2,000 individuals who took time out of their busy schedules to line up and get ordained with us in Tennessee. 

Folks from every walk of life showed up at our events (some coming from across state borders). Countless Tennesseans volunteered their time and resources, places for us to stay, hot meals when we were too busy to leave our posts, space to host future ordination sites, and anything else we didn’t think of ourselves. ...(continued)

Great News, Ministers! A federal judge in Tennessee has frozen the implementation of a law that barred ministers ordained online from solemnizing marriage in the state. That means that if you got ordained online with American Marriage Ministries, you may officiate weddings this summer!

Chief District Judge Waverly Crenshaw said today that there are "serious constitutional issues" with the new Tennessee law that bans ministers ordained online from performing marriages. This means that ministers ordained online may continue to perform legal marriages.

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