A requirement on Church of England clergy to inspect the passports of couples wishing to marry in church to identify forgeries and attempted bogus weddings is causing stress and risking discrimination, the synod has heard.

Despite pleas by some clergy members to ease the legal and administrative burden, the synod narrowly backed the continuation of an 800-year-old requirement to read marriage banns ahead of church weddings.

It voted by 184 votes to 163 against a motion calling for marriage banns – traditionally read in church three times in the three months before a wedding – to be replaced by a civil process.



The Rev Stephen Trott of Peterborough, who proposed the motion, said clergy were now required to check the passports of all those intending to marry. He had attended training from the UK Border Agency on how to detect fake passports, but said: “At the end of the day, they admitted they find it difficult. What hope do the clergy have?”



Clergy were forced to grapple with legal guidelines, whose “language and terminology is arcane in the extreme, and a source of great concern and even stress to [those] who must operate it.” Mistakes opened the clergy up to discipline by both the church and courts, he added.



Criminal gangs were organising sham marriages, he said. “There are serious consequences for clergy acting as untrained registrars, who bend the rules for any reason, including a failure to understand what is at stake.”



Now, he said, “there is a whole category of people against whom we must discriminate on account of their nationality … I find myself very uneasy at having to treat people differently on account of their passport. Is marriage a Christian ordinance or a legal ceremony?”



Trott and other supporters of the motion argued that the banns were outdated, legally complex, time-consuming and a source of anxiety to clergy.



Opponents said abolishing them would significantly reduce opportunities to engage with large numbers of people, and maintained an important link between church and state.



Banns were introduced in 1215, with the intention of preventing unlawful or clandestine marriages, bigamy, marriage to a minor, or unscrupulous attempts to take financial advantage of a woman.



They are a public announcement within a parish of a couple’s intention to marry, and invite anyone with a reason why this may not be lawful to come forward.



For a significant proportion of the C of E’s 45,000 annual marriage ceremonies, banns need to be read in three different churches if the couple live in different parishes and intend to marry in a third.



Trott said: “Eight hundred years ago the publication of banns was heard by everyone in the community. Not so in 2017. Not in major conurbations, nor even in rural England. It no longer does what it says on the tin. It is a hopelessly ineffective means of inquiry, almost to the point of pretence.”



He proposed replacing banns with civil preliminaries operated by a professional registrar. Couples could obtain a licence but still have their wedding conducted in church. No one would be deterred from seeking a church wedding if they first had to complete civil paperwork, he said.



The time had come “to simplify an ancient tradition by which we have become hidebound, and in the process lift the burden of the law from wedding couples and from the clergy”, Trott said.



But Rev Kate Stacey from Oxford said the reading of banns offered a “wonderful missional opportunity” for couples to become part of a church community, instead of “sending them off to the faceless bureaucracy” of a local registry office.



“Banns are not a burden but a gateway for non-church couples to encounter God,” she added.



The Ven Cherry Vann of Manchester said banns put clergy in direct contact with some 90,000 people each year, most of them under the age of 45. “Let’s not shoot ourselves in the foot by abolishing them.”



In 2015, the church conducted about 45,000 marriage services, down from approximately 55,000 10 years earlier. The total number of weddings in England and Wales in 2012 was 262,240, with civil ceremonies accounting for about 70%.

