Reverend Allen was overall an OK choice for us. He is experienced with speaking in front of a crowd and has side hustles
as a singer/entertainer in different contexts. He was always punctual at each of our meetings, responsive in his correspondence,
and brought some good ideas to the table. Everyone at the wedding complimented his performance and thought it was a beautiful ceremony, as did we.
However, I could not give him 5 stars due to a couple qualms.
First, I had to repeat details a lot throughout the planning process. This left me with an impression of disorganization.
Second, we felt the ceremony writing came way too late in the wedding planning process and as a result, the initial wedding ceremony draft seemed rushed in
its assembly. The first draft came in a couple weeks before the wedding date, which I think is plenty of time if the first draft had been more complete.
I understand first drafts are just that, first drafts, but it was riddled with grammatical issues and was filled with ellipses
indicating that there was more to come. It was difficult to get a feel for how the ceremony was going to flow. It didn't have all the content in it, which
told me it was written yet. With all the ellipses seeming to indicate he was going to fill in the blanks I shrugged it off thinking it was more of an
outline and he would improv the rest. This was not the case, the ceremony was delivered exactly as it was written, which felt a bit stitched together hastily.
I had to edit the ceremony quite a bit through all the back and forth and the final draft was provided like 4 days before the wedding when we already had
guests in town and I had other things to manage beyond going over another draft, so I just left it as-is and felt I was out of time for another round of
edits. Again, people loved the ceremony and I'm the only one that would notice the issues, but didn't leave me with warm fuzzies. I would have preferred
having the final and full transcript of the ceremony around the time we got the first draft in order to have the time to make sure it was exactly what we
wanted.
Lastly, Reverend Allen forgot to actually ask the bride the "I DO" section. He did me first, doing the "repeat after me" section followed by a
string of questions that I would ultimately respond "I DO" to. However, when the bride's turn came, he did the "repeat after me" part, but neglected
to ask her the same string of questions and she never said "I DO". Kind of the pinnacle moment of the ceremony to just gloss over.
Despite the shortcomings, I would still recommend Reverend Allen, everyone loved the ceremony and I'm just hard to please.