About New Traditions
In 2010 I asked the woman I love to marry me. That turned out to be the easy part. More difficult was finding someone to officiate our non-religious wedding ceremony, as we are both Secular Humanists. We eventually settled on a Unitarian/Universalist minister but even that was not ideal as she was also into astrology and insisted on creating personalized astrological readings for us. Luckily the ceremony went well and she kept to the agreed upon script but it made me aware of the lack of secular wedding officiants in the Lancaster area. After a little research, I found out that Lancaster was not the only area to have a lack of non-religious officiants and that many people that wished to have a secular wedding ended up having to settle for a religious minister or plan a trip to the courthouse to get married. Humanist Celebrants, in particular, were few and far between.
I decided to do something about this problem and to help non-religious couples to have the Humanist or non-religious wedding they want without any compromises when it came to who would perform the actual ceremony. In 2011 I became ordained in the Church of Spiritual Humanism in order to provide this service to people in Lancaster and surrounding areas.
That was the beginning of New Traditions where we throw out the old and create new traditions that start with you. I later applied for and was endorsed as a Humanist Celebrant by the Humanist Society, which was founded by the American Humanist Association so that I have official clergy status and can join any couple, anywhere in the U.S. It brings me great joy to be able to be part of your special day and to do all I can to give you the wedding of your dreams. We don’t want any other couples to deal with the frustration that we and others have faced and do our best to craft a custom personalized ceremony for couples that retain our services. We want your wedding to be about YOU.
Scott Rhoades – Humanist Celebrant