Pregnancy test before wedding

By VICTOR KALALANDA, Illinois, USA, October 15, 2021*

My experience living in Zambia has taught me one thing: churches don’t seem to have as much a hard-line policy on funerals as they do on weddings or nuptials.

As the son of a preacher myself, often ridiculed as preacher’s kid or PK, it was easy noticing this as our family often changed churches—whereby I developed keen interest in the goings-on of other religious organisations.

I remember in Ndola when a famous businessman died; his family didn’t need a special permit to hold his funeral service at the local United Church of Zambia (UCZ).

The assumption was that he was previously a member, or possibly an intermittent one lost and anonymous in the crowd of the congregation, until the day of his death.

On closer inspection, this was a mere cosmetic exercise, since businessmen back in the days were largely framed as Satanists, whether real or imagined, not as astute entrepreneurs in modern parlance.

So the church service afforded the deceased a dignified send-off that served to silence rumours that he had lived in filthy lucre or blood money.

But the point is that it has, more often than not, been easy to have funerals in church under such possible pretexts or false pretences. The same cannot be said about weddings.

We see memorial services being held for government ministers, as a relatable example, who never even stepped foot in a church building. Like a joke.

Weddings, on the other hand, lend themselves to a very intriguing case study.

Anybody will tell you that for a marriage to be officially certified, it typically needs approval from three institutions, namely the church, the state and the family.

Of course, we’re not doing a legal debate about civil and customary marriages; but we’re talking about marriage in terms of holy matrimony or as a Christian issue. So these are civil marriages that are subjected to religious ceremonies.   

The practice at my local church in Zambia was to first involve the family and conclude with the church and state.

Around the time of my attendance we suddenly had a lot of people getting married.

This was natural because we weren’t really a family church but most of our members were single young men and women. But the rate was nonetheless unusual, given popular reluctances about marriage, as a result of poor incomes or just childlike, silly phobia which plagues many of us.

Sometimes we had weddings biweekly, which should mean once every two weeks, pretty extraordinary for a church of 100 people, more or less.

So something happened that finally made my pastor question the trend. It had everything to do with a recently wedded couple.

My pastor seemed to ask the question, did they just fool the church or they had been blessed with a miracle?

In their third month of marriage, this woman presented herself at church not with a cute little bump on her stomach, but with a bulging belly as if she had been pregnant for the last 9 months!

This was incredible because first pregnancies, as should be expected of newly-weds, actually don’t show. Some new mothers don’t see anything, bump or hump, until the second trimester of their pregnancy.

For this couple, however, the forthcoming child appeared to be in a forced hurry, so the pastor was concerned.

To avoid a possible clash, having already officiated the wedding, the man of God didn’t address the woman directly, as far as I know,

Instead, he made an unusual announcement one Sunday morning.

“We’re changing the way we do weddings,” he told his audience. “Couples are expected to produce pregnancy test results before their wedding day. We don’t want miracle children.”

He went somewhat slowly on the last sentence to produce a humorous effect, sending the entire congregation into raucous laughter.

Of course, the pastor was not asking for a virginity test, which probably would disqualify all couples from getting married; but the new stance by the ministry was as ridiculous as it was funny.

I have never found out how previously wed couples reacted, but the decision seemed to highlight the indictment of modern weddings.

Rather than examining the morality of this decision, I wonder: are people getting married to cover up pregnancies? What happens the day all marriages are founded on unplanned pregnancies?

I am not sure how far the church may go with its hard-line policy on the wedding ceremony. But whatever happens, I hope it shall be for the better of it, and not for the worst of it.

What do you think?

*This article was first published in the Zambia Daily Mail on the stated date