Three times a year, the International Pentecost Holiness Church (IPHC) in South Africa hosts mass weddings — at Easter, in September and December. The latest mass wedding during Easter was historical thanks to the number of couples or members of the church who participated.
Founded in South Africa in 1962 by Africans instead of foreign missionaries, the IPHC is located in Heidelberg, east of Johannesburg, and is famed for mixing Pentecostal beliefs with local traditions, according to the Associated Press.
Its previous mass wedding in 2023 saw 400 couples in attendance; this Easter, over 1,500 couples participated — the largest since the church’s founding.
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Interestingly, some of the marriages were polygamous, contributing to the large number of participants. In South Africa, polygamy is legal if the union is registered as a customary marriage. Generally, such polygamous marriages are not celebrated in church. However, the IPHC, which welcomes polygamous unions, is allowed to officiate such marriages as long as those marriages are also registered with the country’s home affairs department, BBC reported.
“It is a practice of the church to welcome polygamy. We don’t only celebrate it, but we embrace it. So, as you will see, some couples, or some men or groups, are marrying more than two or more than three wives,” one of the officiating priests, Vusi Ndala, said during the recent Easter ceremony.
“Some of them have three wives already. You are adding two wives, going to have five wives, and can barely do as much as you can, as long as a man has the capacity to support the brides that he’s married. So, there are those that will be married for the first time, and they’ve never been in a marriage before they are,” he added.
Freddy Letsoalo, 35, and 31-year-old Rendani Maemu married for the first time during the Easter mass wedding and have no qualms about embracing polygamy in the future.
“I know there’s a chance that my husband will want to enter into a polygamous marriage,” said Mrs Letsoalo to BBC. “I believe in polygamy.”
This year’s event was held at the church’s headquarters, a 60,000-capacity dome-shaped building in the town of Heidelberg. Long white tents were set up in open fields close to the church building, where the would-be couples were seated ahead of the event and given bridal flowers, food packs and water.
At the official start of the ceremony, the couples filed into the church building in long queues, with many of the women in white bridal gowns and many of the men wearing matching white suits and red ties, according to the AP.
Some of the men, who were marrying their sixth or seventh wives, came along with their current wives for their new marriage.
Even though polygamy is not illegal in South Africa, it is not the dominant form of marriage and is often frowned upon by many people, including most Christian groups.
Prof Musa Xulu, a religious expert with South Africa’s Cultural, Religious and Linguistics Rights Communities Rights Commission, told the BBC that even though churches like the IPHC have an “eclectic approach to Christianity” that was “half-Christian, half-African”, they also do have “doctrinal justifications for their traditions as well as internal dispute-resolution mechanisms.”
“They will assist families who are undergoing distress,” he said.
