We hired Rev. Stephen Johnson as our officiant for our wedding. He did a fine job - we met with him three times to look at wedding ceremony templates. In addition to the wedding ceremony, he did blessings for us at our rehearsal lunch and wedding reception. His hands did shake during the ceremony, which was a bit distracting, but we think that it was due to some type of medical condition. I think he charged pretty much the going rate - $400 plus $50 for attending the rehearsal. Overall, very highly recommened.

Reverend Johnson gave me several examples of his ceremonies, which was very helpful in creating my own ceremony. He was open to my ideas and in the end he performed a beautiful ceremony for my husband and I. Howere, he was sometimes difficult to get in contact with and he could come off as rude. He rushed out of our rehearsal and ceremony so fast that I was unable to ask him several important questions. He also seems to have a medical condition that causes his hands to shake. Several guests said that it was distracting.

Overall the quality was good. He provided us with many options and ideas for the ceremony which was good. The only downside was that he was slow on responding to emails and voicemail and he was very particular on how he wanted things to be set up.

We met with Stephen Johnson a couple of times prior to our wedding, and he was very nice and seemed very open-minded and flexible about how we structured our ceremony. He also provided a lot of guidance and suggestions for the readings and the wording of the ceremony. The problems we had started on the wedding day. He had told us during one of the meetings that he had a microphone that he would bring, so we didn't arrange one through our venue. On the wedding day, he did not bring it. Our ceremony was outdoors and close to an airport, so needless to say, most of our guests did not here the ceremony at all. He also read the entire ceremony straight out of a binder, which seemed a little unprofessional. The third, and most important thing to me is that he completely skipped over the section with our vows. I think this page fell to the ground while he was going through the ceremony, so rather than pick it up, he skipped them completely. I had looked for the perfect vows for a long time leading up to the wedding, so I was pretty upset that they weren't included at all. The cost for him to do the ceremony was $500 and I don't think feel we got near our money's worth.

Fortunately my actual ceremony and meetings leading up to it were great. It was perfect. However it seemed to fall apart from there.

He had asked my aunts if he could follow them to the reception. After they informed him that they were from out of town, but would be happy to lead the way, they did get a little turned around. Rev Steve got out of his car at a stop sign and approached my aunts car (3 aunts and my 86 year old great aunt). He knocked on there window and totally went off on them for getting lost. He was very irrate with them. After they eventually found their way, he stormed into the reception hall and informed my coordinator (my cousin) that "if that married couple doesn't have me sign their license within 5 days, consider this marriage null." He then stormed out and left.

Anyhow, we didn't find out until after the night of the wedding what had happened. We were leaving for our honeymoon the next day and would be gone for more than 5 days. My husband amazingly got a hold of him and we had to drive to Leesburg to meet him to sign our liscense before we left for our honeymoon.

Overall, we were sick in our stomachs the wedding night and now regret even paying him. I know there is always something that goes wrong on the wedding day, but I never imagined it would be with the man marrying us.