What do you want to have happen at your funeral? Have you done any funeral planning? Do you want to design the ceremony and pick out the readings and music? Do you want to choose who is going to participate? Are you going to have a cremation with a service and scatter the ashes? We are talking about the funeral order of service.
If you are having a faith based funeral, the order of service is pretty well dictated. You will be able to pick some of the music or readings from a designated list. You will also be able to choose the pallbearers and people who do the readings. But, in the Catholic Church, for example, that is about the extent of the decisions that you will make. Many of the faith based churches follow a protocol that is in keeping with the religious beliefs of the church and make sure that everyone in the church is treated equally. These are ceremonies that have withstood the traditions of hundreds or thousands of years with hymns that the congregation knows the words to.
If you search the internet for a funeral order of service template, there are plenty of sites that sell you a brochure to give to people to take home. That often becomes a memorial that is passed on through generations and might later become a part of a genealogical research.
There are really two parts or two different meanings to the funeral order of service template. One will be designed or dictated by the church that the funeral is held in. The other will include some basic information about the deceased, a reading or poem, some names of the people that participated, the key dates and maybe a picture. In some cases, the church and funeral home will collaborate and combine these documents into one.
If you are not doing a faith based funeral and are designing your own service, it is referred to as a memorial service. If the memorial service is held at your home, the funeral home, the cemetery or the neighborhood Irish bar, the order of service will be designed and dictated by you. It will involve a lot more of your input and require more of your creativity and resources. If this is the case, don’t wait for the death to occur before you start doing your funeral planning. At the time when you are actually dealing with death or your family is making decisions shortly thereafter, it can be very stressful and you might not have the energy or will to think about this.
