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Hundreds of South Africans tie the knot in Easter mass wedding
More than 1,500 couples got married during a mass wedding at the International Pentecostal Holiness Church (IPHC) at Kanana City, outside Heidelberg in Gauteng.
This record number of wedded couples is believed to surpass, by far, the mass weddings in the same period, when 400 couples tied the knot in 2023.
This year’s highlight of the mass wedding event is that, for the first time, it was held in the newly built 60,000-capacity “The Dome,” the largest congregational dome in the Southern Hemisphere.
The continuous tradition of the IPHC unfolds once again, as thousands of couples are ushered into holy matrimony on one special day.
Three times a year, the church hosts mass weddings, but this particular ceremony marks a historic moment, with the largest number of couples participating since the church’s founding in 1962.
WATCH: IPHC hosts Easter Sunday mass wedding for 1,500 couples
One of the officiating priests, Vusi Ndala, says this year’s mass wedding is unique.
“What makes this year’s mass wedding unique is that for the first time in the history of the church, we have more than 3 000 members that are getting married in one city at a go. So they’re going to be blessed into holy matrimony all at once. This is historical; it has never happened, and we would want to imagine that it’s even a world record. There’s never been such a mass wedding.”
A distinctive feature of this year’s mass wedding was the inclusion of polygamous unions, a practice rooted in African tradition and embraced by the Church.
Ntala says the IPHC welcomes polygamous unions.
“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. 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 explains.
WATCH: Over 3 000 IPHC members tie the knot
