American Marriage Ministries is now incorporated in Tennessee as a non-profit corporation. In order to protect our ministers’ rights in the state, AMM has formed a foreign corporation with the Department of State’s Division of Business Services. Click here to view the filing. 

AMM’s Tennessee incorporation establishes a physical presence in the state, which will help us stay close to our ministers, and ensure that they can still serve their communities. This means that our ministers are now able to get ordained in-person, with a religious organization (AMM) that has in-state incorporation. This ensures that AMM Ministers can claim the same rights as other recognized religious officials in the state....(continued)

Dear members of the Tennessee Legislature,

I am writing because effective July 1, 2019, thousands of our Tennessee ministers will be stripped of their right to perform weddings for their friends, family, and neighbors. Over the next few months, thousands of Tennessee weddings will be thrown into confusion, with couples and ministers deprived of the opportunity to build community and create memories together. Furthermore, HB0213 threatens Tennessee’s multi-million-dollar wedding industry, and could send couples elsewhere to find ministers with whom they have a relationship and shared history – their friends and family. ...(continued)

Senator Yager,

My name is Helen Vaughn and I am an ordained minister. I have performed several weddings as well as several vow renewals of friends and family members elsewhere and here in Tennessee. I have been notified by my organization that as of July 1st, the State that I reside in will be taking this right away from me on July 1st 2019! I do not understand this, and ask that you to explain how this violation of my rights has come about!

We have numerous friends and family members that are transplants and have come to Tennessee and do not want to be married by a Judge who knows nothing about them, or by a minister in a church that has no clue about them and only wants to charge them and preach to them. ...(continued)

Tennessee’s legislature has passed a law that takes away the rights of non-traditional ministers to officiate weddings. The new law, SB1377/HB0213, is the sort of government overreach that our founding fathers warned of, and represents a massive step back for religious freedom. 

Effective July 1, 2019, the government of Tennessee has made itself the arbiter of which ministers can, and can’t perform marriage in the state, stripping away the rights of tens-of-thousands of online-ordained ministers.  

And that’s not all. With the same stroke of his pen, Governor Bill Lee turned Tennessee’s thousands of bureaucrats, government officers, and elected officials into wedding officiants. You heard that right: the new law literally strips private citizens of their rights to officiate weddings, and hands them directly to government bureaucrats. ...(continued)