Are you a funeral celebrant?

Fran Hall 4 Comments

02 October 2018

The GFG is delighted to have been invited to join representatives of various organisations on a working group to look at the role of funeral celebrants.

We’ve called this working group the Funeral Celebrancy Council and last week the FCC spoke to hundreds of celebrants at the second National Celebrant Convention about the work we’ve been doing so far.

More information about the FCC is below, but for now, we’d like to ask for your help if you are a celebrant who carries out funeral ceremonies.

One of the aims of the FCC is to obtain some realistic statistics. There is very little data about funeral celebrancy, so we are running a survey to try and gather accurate information.

The link can be found here – https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/FuneralCelebrancySurvey2018 and it takes less than 10 minutes to complete.

You don’t need to give your name or identify yourself in any way, but your input will help us build a picture of what is happening out there in funeralworld.

Thanks very much in advance!

About the Funeral Celebrancy Council

The FCC is a working group of representatives from all the established relevant organisations in existence, at the time the council was formed, who took up the offer to take part. It’s called a council because we had to call it something.

At present, the council is still in the early stages of identifying what is required to ensure funerals meet the requirements of the bereaved and the funeral industry as a whole, and we want to hear from as many people as possible. Feedback at the national convention from those working in funeral celebrancy was particularly useful.

The members of the council are as follows:

The Association of Independent Celebrants

The Fellowship of Professional Celebrants

Civil Ceremonies

Humanists UK

The Institute of Civil Funerals

Mountain Celebrations

Green Fuse

The National Association of Funeral Directors

The National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors

The Good Funeral Guide,

along with an independent celebrant representing those who choose not to be affiliated to any organisation

Several constructive and productive meetings have taken place in 2018, and as a result a document is in development, setting out common standards that all members of the FCC agree all funeral celebrants should aspire to.

This document, the Accord, is not a contract and no one will sign anything. Working to the Accord will be completely voluntary, but we hope celebrants will look on it as something positive we can all aim for. It is intended to be complimentary to what anyone may already be doing as part of their own organisation’s requirements.

Consultation on this document is ongoing, and the final version is likely to be published in early 2019.

Category: celebrants , ceremony , funeral , funeral customs , funeral trends , research

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Public

5 years ago

Sounds really good. I’d like to know how the public at large gets to know about the existence of funeral celebrants. For both my parents’ funerals in the last decade we found people we knew or they had known to do it – both retired / soon to retire clergy who were excellent and worked with us on putting together a ceremony we were all happy with. We didn’t know about all these independent celebrants out there. So, by what mechanism do / should bereaved get to hear about the existence of funeral celebrants and how would they then go… Read more »

Vita Incerta

5 years ago

Reply to Public

https://funeralcelebrants.org.uk/
simply typing funeral celebrant into Google
This should be a question asked of the family by the funeral director who should typically have a ‘stable’ of celebrants. The fd should also make clear that the family are at liberty to either find their own, perhaps through family and friends recommendation or have a member of their family lead the ceremony for them

public

5 years ago

Reply to Vita Incerta

That sounds good. Does that normally happen in practice?

Sharon Gordon

5 years ago

Reply to Public

More often than not, it is the Funeral Director who puts the family in touch with a Celebrant.