Recently my daughter presented me and my wife with our first grandchild. Although neither my daughter or son-in-law belong to a church, they feel like they’d like to do something to welcome the child into the family and honor, in the case of my daughter, one of her brothers by designating him a “godparent”. More of a “tradition” type thing than religious. They’ve started a search for a church in which to do the ceremony, but I’m thinking they won’t have much luck without registering at a parish and whatever else is required.
They did not have a religious wedding, so I’m just wondering if there is some sort of non-religious ceremony that can be performed in place of a baptism. Something more than a BBQ or a picnic. Any suggestions of websites that might have some information would be great. I haven’t found anything besides blogs (which have not been very useful).
Check with the neighbor’s small churches with less than 50 members. This time of year, they sometimes have picnics in the parks after services or at church itself during services for baptisms. In my area any of the small churches would be tickled to do the services without registering. I would not mess around with anything other than a baptism. Check out the free food services, associations with churches is common and some of them do baptisms for the homeless all the time. Good luck.
I went through this mess with my kids but they ended up baptized.
There is something called blessing ceremonies though that is still religious, of course.
I’m skeptical any other type of ceremony can match the emotional and social resonance that baptism could offer, especially as your daughter wants to appoint a sort of godparent role to her brother. There isn’t really any comparable secular thing.
Since this is CFI, I should advertise their services. The Secular Celebrant title was created as a reaction to the rather discriminatory practice of allowing just about anyone to form a church, and get all of those benefits, but allowing only church officials to sign marriage licenses (and judges and all those, but you get what I mean). It requires some training you have to apply, so this isn’t just some “internet priest” thing.
Anyway, it’s a directory, by state, so search away. Good luck.
I am sharing your information with my daughter and she and her husband are mulling it over. In the way of some more context, her husband is Mexican and family events like baptisms are a big deal. That being said, their wedding was not in a church and had no religious aspects (one of her brothers did a reading from “Game of Thrones”) but did have a few Mexican traditions thrown in. Everyone was good with it so a “baptism” in a similar vein is not going to be an issue.
The ”godparent” thing to them is purely honorary (and let’s face it, even at a religious baptism it isn’t really anything more than that). In this case, my daughter wants to honor her older brother and his husband. And yeah, THAT rules out a large number of churches right off the bat (did I mention they live in Texas?).