Venue Reviews - Minnesota Wedding Chapels

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Most churches require that you be a member if you want to use their church for a wedding, but a few churches and chapels will rent their space to non-members and let you use your own minister. 

I have performed wedding ceremonies at dozens of churches around town, and I highly recommend the following sites, which allow non-members to rent them for weddings. Contact information, chapel site rental fees and other costs, plus notes about their use as a wedding site are listed for each chapel.

The Minnesota wedding chapels reviewed here are:

* Lake Harriet Spiritual Community in South Minneapolis
* Fort Snelling Memorial Chapel, between Minneapolis and St. Paul
* Nazareth Chapel at Northwestern College, just north of St. Paul
* Wesley Church in downtown Minneapolis

Lake Harriet Spiritual Community - South Minneapolis

Fort Snelling Memorial Chapel

The Fort Snelling Chapel is set aside from the rest of Fort Snelling State Park, so there is plenty of privacy for your wedding. You can hardly tell that you're in the middle of a big city.	Flags are set up at the Fort Snelling Chapel, but it doesn't have a military appearance in person. The chapel has more of an old-fashioned, cozy feel to it.
Fort Snelling Chapel is perfect for smaller weddings because it's not as tall and spacious as many churches.	During a wedding ceremony at Fort Snelling Chapel, the minister stands with the couple in the middle of the altar, and any readers come up this lecturn off to the side to read.

The complex at Fort Snelling is also home to the Fort Snelling Club (612-725-2272, $700, seats 300), which is available for wedding receptions. One advantage of using this reception site is that they do not charge sales tax, city tax, or state liquor tax on their liquor (which can total up to 15%). Note that the Fort Snelling Club (Building 89) is not the same as the Officer's Club. 

Fort Snelling Memorial Chapel is about 1/2 mile from Buca di Beppo, which is a great Italian restaurant that serves everything "family style" (portions for 3-5 people). It's perfect for a rehearsal dinner. 

The cost of renting the Fort Snelling Memorial Chapel is about $600 for a wedding ceremony, with two options for Saturdays: either 11:00am-2:00pm or 4:00-7:00pm. Call 612-725-2390 to talk to the chapel secretary, Barb. She is very efficient, and if you have to leave a message she will get right back to you. Also, the site manager, Darrel, is a wonderful guy who has worked there for years; I have worked with him for many wedding ceremonies. The chapel seats up to 300 people, but it has a small, cozy, intimate feel, and I've performed wedding ceremonies there with just 20 guests, and it worked just fine.

Nazareth Chapel at Northwestern College

Roseville's Nazareth Chapel at Northwestern College is spacious and gorgeous - perfect for a grand, elegant wedding. The chapel has marble columns, stone walls, and wooden pews. To get to the chapel, visitors drive through the college's beautiful tree-lined campus. This wedding chapel books up faster than any other in the Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, area, because of its striking beauty. The grounds are amazing, too - even though it's in the middle of the Twin Cities, you feel like you're really away from it all because the campus is so lush and isolated. Nazareth Chapel also has an adjoining reception hall with its own catering, if you'd like to have the reception there. 

If you are looking for a rehearsal dinner location, the upscale Jax Cafe in nearby northeast Minneapolis has five private dining rooms.

Nazareth Chapel is located in Roseville, Minnesota, off of Snelling Avenue, just south of I-694. The site rental fee for weddings at the Nazareth Chapel is about $800-$900. The chapel seats 300 people. Call 651-631-5388 and talk to Debbie Bock.

Wesley Church - Downtown Minneapolis

Wesley Church is a gorgeous stone church in the Nicollet Avenue/Convention Center area of downtown Minneapolis, MN. The church is very community-oriented and permits non-members to rent the space for wedding ceremonies. Not only is the exterior beautiful, with gorgeous red stone, the interior is stunning, too - it has carved wood and rich upholstery. Even though most weddings don't use the church's balcony, it gives the space a grand, magnificent feel, while the main floor seems intimate and friendly. So Wesley Church is beautiful, romantic, and cozy, yet spacious enough to accomodate the largest of weddings. The cherry color of the wood really warms the whole place up. The bridal staircase can provide a unique entrance for the bride, but most brides and grooms choose to come down the center aisle. 

A great nearby rehearsal dinner option is the Ichiban Japanese Steakhouse, which is two blocks away on Nicollet Avenue.

Wesley Church is located in downtown Minneapolis, across the street from a small, well-kept park, which is perfect for wedding pictures. While most wedding ceremonies at Wesley Church have 150-200 guests (a size that works quite well in the space), the bottom floor of the sanctuary easily seats 500 people, and the top can fit another 400 to 500. So the site can actually accomodate almost 1,000 people. The rental fee for Wesley Church is about $1,350, and they're very generous about what they include: 5 hours on the wedding day, 1-1/2 hours for the rehearsal, the sound tech, the custodian, and the services of the site manager, Molly Campe, who helps set things up. Molly is the person to call about renting the church for weddings; her phone number is 612-518-5568. Molly is really helpful, knowlegeable, and friendly - if she's not at her desk, just leave a message, and she'll return your phone call quickly. 

Wedding chapel question:

Hi, Pastor Tomkin,

I was lucky enough to find your site and I must say that I really appreciate all of the helpful information as I am just at the beginning of planning our wedding. We live in downtown St. Paul and really would like to have a "downtown" St. Paul wedding. I have to say that I really loved reading the background information about how you came to do what you are doing now. I was raised Catholic but also feel that it is very important to have my Native American heritage be a part of our wedding. My fiance was also raised Catholic and it is very important to him to get married in a Catholic church. Are there Catholic churches in St. Paul (we are willing to go outside of St. Paul if need be) where you have performed ceremonies? We are looking at a November 2008 wedding and possibly on a Friday night as we really want to have the wedding reception at the Landmark Center and this is the only time it is available. Please let me know, and again it was so nice to read your website and how you feel about those with different "feelings and beliefs."

Thank you!

Answer:

Thank you so much for all your kind words! You've made my day. I've actually performed several wedding ceremonies where one or both of the parties were Native American, so I have some familiarity with respecting the traditions of Native Americans. 

I have also performed many interfaith wedding ceremonies where either the bride or groom is Catholic, so I am very familiar with the Catholic tradition. Unfortunately, Catholic churches have very strict policies regarding weddings - both parties must be Catholic, for instance, and they must both go through Catholic wedding counseling and be married by a Catholic priest. So while there are a couple Catholic churches in downtown St. Paul (St. Mary's at 651-222-2619, and Assumption at 651-224-7536), I wouldn't be able to perform the wedding ceremony there.

Have you thought about having a reverent, Catholic-tradition wedding ceremony at the Landmark Center? That option can be a good one, and with a minister performing the wedding ceremony families are usually very receptive to the idea. That option might be worth talking over with the site manager - I have performed many wedding ceremonies there and the site has worked extremely well.

By the way, if you're interested in a piece of advice, here goes: If you like the Landmark Center at all, I would highly recommend booking it immediately. There are not that many banquet sites available in the Twin Cities, and they book FAST.

Warm regards,

Rev. Tomkin Coleman

Wedding chapel question:

Dear Rev. Coleman,

I have been using your site as a great reference trying to plan a MN wedding from Chicago. We have booked the James J. Hill Library for a reception in October (25th) but are having some trouble finding a wedding ceremony site for about 200 people. We would like for our ceremony to be non-denominational but to still feel spiritual.

Can you suggest any venues? We'd like it to be indoors. We love LOVE the Nazareth Chapel but it is already booked for our date. Something similar would be wonderful.

I'm sure you get a lot of emails everyday - but I thought I'd give it a shot.

Thank you in advance for your time.

Answer:

Hmm...a spiritual wedding, but non-denominational. Let's see - first of all, have you thought about having a minister perform a wedding ceremony at the Library? It's a wonderfully grand site, and can work well for the wedding ceremony...then, during the cocktail hour, they set it all up for the reception.

If it's a chapel or church you're looking for, I highly recommend Wesley Church in downtown Minneapolis, which is about 8 miles from the James J. Hill Library, and both locations are right off of the freeway, I-94. On the weekends, they're about 10 minutes away (okay, maybe 15 or so...but it's not far, really).

I've been trying to think of other chapels that would meet your needs. I had thought of one other (the historic "Little White Church in the Valley" in Golden Valley), but that one only seats 80.

As we talked about, most churches won't rent to non-members, and the ones that do usually charge a premium. For instance, Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church is $2,500; and the Basilica is $3,000-$4,000.

I have performed several wedding ceremonies at the Diamond Lake Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, and they might be worth checking out. (I'm really searching here, because I don't know their fees...I just know that I've performed wedding ceremonies there.) Diamond Lake Lutheran Church's phone number is 612-866-2579.

If you haven't seen it already, here are pictures and info for Concordia University's chapel in St. Paul, which is also called Graebner Memorial Chapel.

Warmly,

Rev. Tomkin Coleman

	My recommendations for wedding sites in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area:
		Chapels      Parks      Gardens      Mansions      Museums      Hotels      Farms      Historic Sites     Amphitheaters      Restaurants     Comparison Matrix