Gloriavale newlyweds sent to consummate arranged marriage as everyone waits 'so they can have lunch'
Friday, 9 September 2022
Touching your fiancé is forbidden at the Gloriavale Christian Community, but you are expected to consummate the arranged marriage before lunch.
Melody Pilgrim remembers sitting in a room waiting to find out who the Overseeing Shepherd had chosen for her.
“I was sitting there scared and shaking, I didn’t know who was going to walk in.
“The room was set up nicely with flowers and in walked this young man with a bunch of flowers. He knelt down and said he would be honoured if I became his wife,” she said.
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Melody was delighted to accept and her fiancé, Christian Pilgrim, announced their engagement at breakfast the next morning.
The couple was then allowed to sit together for meals and meet up at their hostel under the chaperone of her father-in-law.
Within five weeks she was nervously dressing alone in a pale pink dress – a welcome change from blue, she said.
Pilgrim said she felt excited when she walked into the main hall to applause and saw it decorated with daffodils and painted scenes for the double-wedding.
The ceremony began at 9am and took about three hours with leaders talking about marriage and sharing scriptures before the couples made their vows and went away to consummate the marriage.
“The first time you hold hands is in front of everyone, as well as your first kiss, then later when you are alone together you feel rushed as the leader is knocking on the door asking if you are done yet, and you know everyone is waiting for you to get back so they can have lunch,” she said.
The lunch was ham rolls with cream cheese or sour cream and pineapple and cheese salad, followed by more entertainment from family members performing dances, songs, poems and skits before a dinner of roast pork and kumara with punch and apple juice and a dessert of icecream and fruit salad.
“I was told to obey my husband in everything. Whatever he says that’s what you are to do,” she said.
She knew of other couples who did not want to get married and others who fell in love but weren’t allowed to have a wedding.
She felt fortunate to have found a caring husband who helped around the home but their life was turned upside down when her husband was 'put out” of the community for questioning the leaders and Pilgrim was put under immense pressure to stay.
“It was 10 months before I joined him with our four girls. He was really hurt in that and I felt really hurt. We both wanted to be together. It took a long time after I came out to get back to how our marriage should be. It was a heart-breaking time. I never want to go back there,” she said.
“Now I feel like I am finding myself and who I am. I wasn’t confident to explore how I felt and my opinions and know that what I say and how I think and feel is just as important as what my husband feels. We are on the same level now I don’t feel I’m below him.”
Caleb Helpful said the expectation to get married started as soon as he was 16.
“There was a lot of ‘why aren’t you getting married? What’s stopping you? When are you getting married, you are not getting any younger’,” he said.
When he was 18, after the leaders approached his mother, Helpful went to former founder Hopeful Christian about getting married.
“You don’t have any say. There was no list of names of girls you could possibly marry. Hopeful just said we are going to pray and fast about it,” he said.
“He said it’s good that you don’t have a name picked out, that means you are open to God’s will.”
Helpful now believes Christian’s decisions were not God’s will but “family ties and a little bit of power games” because leaders’ children often marry each other.
While happy with the woman Christian chose for him, he found the courtship difficult.
“You can’t make an emotional or physical connection because a person is with you, or you just need to be in the open where people are around. There’s no touching, no kissing, nothing like that until your wedding day. It’s not normal at all. It’s very weird,” he said.
He found the wedding day “pretty uncomfortable and inappropriate” when the couple were sent away to consummate the marriage and a leader knocked on the door 45 minute later.
The leaders asked the couple to sign a document confirming they consummated the marriage, which made Helpful feel sick.
“They say they needed that for the JP to make the marriage legal. I know now that is horse shit. It’s part of the sexual perverted environment the old dudes have got up there.”
Helpful left the community with his wife and children in 2017. He now lives in Timaru and he says one of the few happy memories of his time in Gloriavale was their honeymoon.
“We got to go away from that place to a log cabin for a week.
“It was the first time I felt relaxed and we spent time alone away from everybody getting to know each other,” he said.
The Gloriavale website says a marriage only comes into being when it is consummated.