c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) When Jon Tarnow was looking for someone to perform his wedding to Luz Marina Aguirre, the Manhattan couple went to the place where engaged couples have found everything from caterers to calla lilies _ the Internet.

“There was a bunch of Googling going on,” said Tarnow, who discovered the Celebrant USA Foundation Web site (http://www.celebrantusa.com). Celebrants are not traditional clergy. Instead, they are ordained after completing a six-month online course, and they emphasize putting the couple’s wishes before their personal beliefs.

Tarnow, whose family is Jewish, and Aguirre, whose family is Catholic and from Colombia, chose Charlotte Eulette, the foundation’s national director, to marry them on Aug. 31, 2003 in Central Park.

“We were looking for a way to make sure we didn’t disrespect any of our backgrounds,” Tarnow said. “We got married under a huppah that my grandmother crocheted. I stepped on the glass at the count of uno, dos, tres.”

“Many couples are using the Internet to find officiants,” said Rosie Amodio, executive editor of The Knot, a wedding Web site (http://www.theknot.com), with 2.1 million visitors a month. “On our message boards we find a lot of people discussing what they’ve done. More and more couples want to personalize the experience and feel more of a connection with the officiant.”

Couples like Tarnow and Aguirre who go online can find Web sites for everyone from interfaith clergy with a wide range of backgrounds to traditionally ordained rabbis and ministers. There are also directories where officiants pay to advertise and sites geared to interfaith couples. While most mainstream denominations do not offer lists of wedding ministers, visitors to denominational Web sites can often enter a zip code to find a local church.

“Ministry is all about communication,” said the Rev. Keith Kron, a Unitarian Universalist minister. “The Web has become another way we communicate.”

For organizations like Interfaith Clergy and the Rabbinic Center for Research and Counseling, both of whom have worked with interfaith families for years, the Web site is the newest tool to reach these couples.

Sometimes interfaith couples discover local clergy are unwilling to marry them.

“These are people who need help,” said Rabbi Shimon L. Berris, director of Interfaith Clergy. “Fifty percent of the people who get married today marry someone of another faith. That’s a lot of marriages that the majority of clergy won’t touch.”

Interfaith Clergy receives about 50 percent of its inquiries through their Web site (http://www.interfaithclergynetwork.com). Staff members match couples with some of the 75 affiliated ministers, rabbis, priests and former priests in Delaware, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. They marry several hundred couples a year.

At the Rabbinic Center for Research and Counseling Web site (http://www.rcrconline.org), visitors can pay $30 to download a list of about 335 Reform or Reconstructionist rabbis across the country who are willing to officiate at interfaith weddings. The list also includes conditions. For example, some rabbis are not willing to officiate in a chapel that contains Christian symbols, others are. The center encourages rabbinic participation for these couples, said Rabbi Irwin Fishbein, center director.

“I want to be there as a positive force for them to identify with, so the chances are increased that they are going to participate in the Jewish community and in Jewish life,” Fishbein said.

Not all couples who go online are interfaith, said Amodio. With the growing popularity of destination weddings, some couples look for officiants at the vacation spot where they’re getting married. Some just want more than a civil ceremony and are looking for unique ways to honor their cultural backgrounds or spiritual beliefs.

While many options are available online, couples need to do their homework.

“In some ways, like online shopping, it makes the buyer much more responsible,” said Sheila Gordon, who has worked with couples planning their weddings in her position as president of Interfaith Community Inc. “You need to prepare more rather than less.”

It’s a good idea to interview officiants, ask about their education and experience, and ask practical questions like whether they will be performing another wedding on the same day.

For same-sex couples, particularly those who want a clergy person to perform a ceremony, the Internet is especially valuable.

“With the same-sex wedding guide and the pre-marital counseling guide up on our Web site (http://www.uua.org), we get any number of inquiries from people asking where they can get married by a Unitarian minister,” said Kron, who is director of the office of bisexual, gay, lesbian and transgender concerns for the Unitarian Universalist Association. The number of inquiries has doubled in recent months, he said. He now maintains a list of ministers available to marry gay couples in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal.

For any couple, the process of finding an officiant online can be an opportunity to consider what they want in a ceremony and in the person who performs it.

“It may encourage people to be more thoughtful,” Gordon said. “It’s one of these new paradigms. The old paradigm was you married the boy next door and you both had gone to the same church anyway. This is somebody you’re finding online. It’s a whole different ballgame.”

DEA/JL END ROAN