What is a Funeral Celebrant?
A Funeral Celebrant is a professional who creates, leads and officiates funeral or memorial ceremonies, offering a personalised and meaningful experience that honours the life of the deceased.
Unlike traditional religious clergy, we tailor ceremonies to reflect the beliefs, values, and personality of the individual, whether religious, spiritual, or secular.
We create and deliver ceremonies for cremations, traditional burials, natural burials, ashes interment and ashes scattering ceremonies as well as memorials after direct cremations.
We work closely with your Funeral Director, if you are using one, to ensure your day is exactly how you want it to be.
We Meet with Your Family
We meet with the family or close friends of the deceased to learn about their life, their values, and their preferences for the ceremony. This can include discussing special memories, important achievements, hobbies, and their personality.
We also help families make decisions about readings, music, or rituals that can be included, ensuring the ceremony reflects the individual’s life, beliefs and character.
We prefer to meet face to face but can meet virtually if needed via Teams or Zoom.
We Create Your Ceremony
We create and write the whole ceremony for you, including the eulogy, which is a tribute that tells the story of the person’s life, loves, values, and legacy. This can be written by us as the celebrant, family members, or both. We work with you leading up to the ceremony to ensure you are 100% happy with the content, and we always provide you with a copy to keep.
Depending on your wishes, we can include poetry, music, moments of silence, or even multimedia presentations on screens (such as photo collages or even videos).
If there are religious or spiritual elements, we can also incorporate prayers or readings from scriptures if that is what you would like. Unlike ceremonies led by a Church or other religious organisation’s officials, we are not bound by any rules that you have to follow when it comes to creating a ceremony the way you would like it done.
Officiating at the Ceremony
The Celebrant acts as the main facilitator, setting the tone of the event, guiding attendees through the different parts of the ceremony, and helping to create an atmosphere of reflection, celebration, or mourning, based on your preferences, we’ll help you every step of the way.
We can also coordinate with other participants, such as family members, friends, or other speakers, to ensure the ceremony runs smoothly.
Non-Traditional or Secular Ceremonies
We provide a highly personalised, flexible, and more inclusive approach to funerals compared to traditional religious ceremonies. We aim to create a ceremony that resonates deeply with both the life of the deceased and the needs of the family.
We also have the flexibility to lead funerals in diverse locations (e.g., outdoors, at the beach or at a family home) and in non-traditional formats, making the ceremony more tailored to the wishes of the deceased or you as their loved ones.
We can incorporate lovely touches such as dove or butterfly releases, as well as helping you source a memory book for after the ceremony, and other lovely ideas like packets of seeds that people can take away, with a poem or name of your loved one on the packet. There’s lots of beautiful ways to remember the life of your loved one.
Support for Families
Besides officiating, we also offer emotional support, helping guide the family through the process of planning and conducting the ceremony. At Free Spirit Ceremonies we can help you plan the whole day, including florists, locations for after the ceremony and providers of catering.
Some families also would like a photographer or videographer to capture the day, both before, during and after the ceremony, and this is a service that we offer at Free Sprit Ceremonies.
We also provide follow-up support, such as helping with post-ceremony rituals or creating memorial ceremonies after a direct cremation, as an example.
Working with people who are dying
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