How to Become a Funeral Celebrant: A Rewarding Path in Celebrancy Training

Nov 15

The role of a funeral celebrant is both meaningful and impactful. A funeral celebrant creates and delivers personal funeral services that honours and celebrate the lives of those who have died, ensuring families feel supported and heard during a challenging time.

But what exactly does it mean to be a celebrant, and how do you become a celebrant? If you’re curious about the journey, this guide will walk you through the steps and benefits of entering this deeply rewarding profession.

What Is the Meaning of Celebrants?

Celebrants are professionals who write and lead ceremonies to mark important life events, such as weddings, funerals, and naming ceremonies. A celebrant for a funeral works closely with families to craft a service that reflects the personality, beliefs, and values of the deceased. Unlike religious ministers or vicars, celebrants provide highly personalised and flexible ceremonies, tailored to individual needs and with the celebration of the life and person at the heart of art of the service.

Independent funeral celebrants will still honour religious beliefs by including prayers, hymns, and Bible readings, if this is what the family want. Independent funeral celebrants will also do completely non-religious funeral services too, Humanist-style funerals, and everything in between. 

In a personal funeral service, this might mean including unique tributes, favourite music, and even elements of humour to celebrate the person’s life. The growing demand for this personal touch has made celebrancy training a popular choice for people seeking a fulfilling career.

Why Become a Funeral Celebrant?

Becoming a funeral celebrant offers a rare opportunity to make a genuine difference in people’s lives. It’s a role that combines creativity, empathy, and professionalism. With the rise in demand for non-traditional and life-centred funeral services, there’s never been a better time to explore celebrant training. Even the Church of England's latest statistics suggests that 80% of funerals are now written and delivered by funeral celebrants. 

Key reasons people choose this career path include:

1) Making a Difference

Helping families celebrate their loved ones’ lives in a meaningful way. 

2) Flexibility

Many celebrants enjoy the freedom of being self-employed, working when they like and for who they like. Many celebrants achieve a completely different work-life balance compared with other forms of paid employment. 

3) Personal Growth

The role of a celebrant often brings profound personal satisfaction. It is interesting and varied to learn about the rich and diverse lives of people in your local community over the last 100 years. 

4) Rising Demand

More people are seeking celebrants for funerals as they move away from traditional church-style services. 

How to Become a Celebrant for Funerals

So, how do you become a celebrant? While celebrancy is an unregulated profession in the UK, this doesn’t mean it’s an unskilled one. Proper and practical celebrant training is essential to build confidence and to ensure you can work professionally with families and funeral directors to write and deliver a dignified and personal funeral service . Here’s a step-by-step guide:


Step 1) Research the Role

Understand the responsibilities of a funeral celebrant. This includes meeting with families, helping them to co-create the funeral service including selecting music, readings and tributes, writing eulogies for families and then officiating at the funeral service with care and professionalism. 

You can do your research with this FREE celebrant training. 

Step 2) Choose the Right Celebrancy Training

 You do not need an academic qualification to work as a celebrant.
Look for a program that offers in-depth funeral celebrant training, covering all aspects of the role. There are online celebrant courses which save you having to travel as well as face-to-face celebrant courses for a more physical interaction.

Group or class based training, whether online or face-to-face tend to be time limited (e.g. 3 days) but it is often a "one-size fits all" approach and content can be restricted due to time constraints. There is also often minimal or no one-to-one formative assessment and development of practical skills. Learning through "group" or "pair-work" can often vary greatly depending upon the quality of your group or pair. Which can be random!

Alternatively, a self-paced online celebrant training course can combine the best of one-to-one training and development the convenience and reduced cost of online learning.

At Celebrant Training School, we provide flexible, online training designed to fit around your life. Our courses include bite-sized instructional videos which teaches in-depth content and practical skills. You can watch and re-watch the videos at your own pace with downloadable notes and documents for you to edit and save you time.

To develop your practical skills and to maximise your learning,  our courses include personalised one-to-one assessments, both written and live online (via Zoom)  and ongoing support to help you succeed.

Step 3) Build Your Confidence and Experience

At Celebrant Training School, our trainees practice the art of holding an effective and efficient next-of-kin meeting with their tutor. Their active listening, questioning and note-taking skills are assessed and developed before being "let loose" on the real public.

Likewise, whilst writing a eulogy for a loved one is often a common experience, writing an appropriate, personal and meaningful eulogy for a person you don't know, is more challenging. Once again, our tutors assess and develop the skills of trainees on a one-to-one basis before they ever attempt to work for a Funeral Director. 

Getting this right is vital as too many poorly trained funeral celebrants make mistakes and misjudgements. They rarely get re-booked by discerning Funeral Directors. 

Step 4) Build Your Network

Most funeral celebrants will get their bookings from Funeral Directors and arrangers. Consequently, building a trusting relationship with a number of local funeral directors is vital to get professional work as a celebrant. 

Funeral Directors look for celebrants who are reliable, professional and thorough as their reputation is at stake when they book a celebrant to write and deliver a service for one of their families. 

Step 5) Continue Learning

Whilst the funeral industry is a conservative and a fairly traditional field, trends and preferences still change over time as evidence by the decline in traditional church-led funeral services and the increase in demand in personal celebrations of life. 

Trends in funeral celebrancy to be aware of include: 
a) the rise in more environmentally friendly natural and woodland burials
b) the rise in municipal burials due to death rates amongst communities with a cultural heritage of burials but who are nonetheless secular. 
c) living eulogies and living funerals - where people who know they are nearing death actively participate in writing some of their own funeral with the aid of a celebrant, or indeed have a celebration of their life, before they die so they can enjoy it too!

What Makes Celebrant Training School Unique?

At Celebrant Training School, we specialise in providing high-quality practical online celebrant training for successful professional funeral celebrants. We provide business know-how and tools so you can launch your own successful celebrant business. 

Our courses are entirely self-paced and online, giving you the flexibility to learn in your own time,  while still benefiting from one-to-one assessment, development and guidance from skilled and  experienced celebrants.

We provide your proven marketing and business strategies to launch yourself as a self-employed celebrant. You will know how to obey the law, get bookings and how to grow your business year-on-year.

We focus on practical skills that go beyond theory, ensuring you feel fully prepared and confident to work with families, write funeral  services and lead dignified and personal funeral memorials and services.

Our support goes beyond you completing the course. You will be invited to join our thriving and supportive celebrant community and you can access ongoing 1-to-1 support at any time you need it. 
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