Hello everyone!
LONG POST ALERT:
My fiance' and I are getting married in our hometown. We don't want a very large wedding and want our reception to have an intimate feel. However, we both have large extended families and our parents are both very active in the community. Our initial guest list was around 180 total, but since including our parents’ wishes (they’re paying and still live in our hometown) the guest list has grown to over 200 and will likely cap out at 250, but could go even higher. Part of the reason why our list is growing is because of our respective church families whom we’re both close too. Since we’re getting married in my home church we would like to share our ceremony with many of our church members, but it would be difficult to include them all and still maintain the intimate feel at our formal reception. To add—our venue has limited space so even if we had the space and an even larger budget it wouldn’t be feasible. We’re thinking about having an open ceremony, but worry about our church families feeling slighted as previous threads have suggested. To curtail some of this I'm thinking we could have the ceremony at my church, along with cake cutting, punch, and our grand exit (since logistically it would be difficult to do at our venue). We would spend an hour taking pictures in the sanctuary while people nibbled on mini cupcakes and very light bites, then do a cake cutting, thank our guest, then do our grand exit to the reception. This way our ceremony only guest get to participate in some of the important wedding moments.
Those guest (primarily family and close
friends) invited to the reception would be told via the website about the open
ceremony schedule and asked to go to the reception venue after the grand exit.
Thoughts? Has anyone done something like this before? It would be relatively easy to coordinate since we’re thinking we would only formally invite 50 people to the ceremony only.
And would you have a separate invite and website for ceremony guest?