How to Hire a Funeral Celebrant

A Step-by-Step Guide

There are a lot of reasons someone lands on a post like this one.

Maybe a parent is in hospice and the family is starting to think about what comes next. Maybe a death has just happened and the funeral home asked, gently, who you would like to officiate the service. Maybe the death was months ago and you are finally ready to gather the people who loved them and do the goodbye the way it should have been done the first time.

Or maybe none of that. Maybe you follow my work, or you have been quietly curious about what a celebrant actually does, or you are thinking ahead for someone you love long before any of this is urgent. All of those are good reasons to be here. This post is written for everyone reading.

Hiring the right person to lead an end-of-life ceremony is one of the most important decisions a family makes, and almost no one is taught how to do it. There’s no class for this. There’s no checklist taped to the refrigerator. So let me walk you through it the way I would walk a friend through it.

Here’s what to look for in a funeral celebrant, what to ask, and what actually happens when we first sit down to talk, whether you reach out directly or through the funeral home that is already helping you carry the rest.

First, a Quick Word on What a Celebrant Is

A funeral celebrant, sometimes called an end-of-life celebrant or officiant, is a trained, certified professional who writes and leads personalized funerals, memorials, graveside services, and celebrations of life.

A good celebrant listens first. They sit with the family and learn who this person actually was, the stories that get told around the kitchen table, the quiet habits, the laugh everyone could pick out of a crowd. From there, they write a service from scratch, built around that person and shaped by what matters to the family.

Favorite songs, meaningful readings, cultural and faith traditions, small rituals that carry weight, and yes, the humor too if the loved one was the funny one, because a celebration of someone who made people laugh should make people laugh. On the day, a celebrant arrives early, leads the ceremony gently and well, and follows up afterward to make sure the family is okay.

If that's a new idea, I wrote a fuller introduction here: What Is an End-of-Life Celebrant? A Plain-Language Guide for Families.

This post picks up from there. You’ve decided a celebrant might be the right fit.

Now what?

Step 1: Decide How You Want to Find One

In Michigan, families typically come to a celebrant one of two ways. Both are good. The work is the same. The only thing that changes is who introduces us.

Through the funeral home

Most funeral homes in Central Michigan, and increasingly across the state, keep a short list of celebrants they refer to. When the funeral director asks, “Do you have someone in mind to lead the service?” and the answer is no, they will usually offer a few names.

If the funeral home suggests a celebrant, that’s a good sign. It means they’ve worked with that person before, trust them to help grieving families, and know they will show up prepared. You’re welcome to say yes. You’re also welcome to ask for another option, or to bring your own person to the table. All of that’s normal, and a good funeral director will be glad you spoke up.

Directly

Plenty of families find their celebrant on their own. Through a search, a friend’s recommendation, a service they once attended where the officiant got it exactly right, a social media post that made them stop scrolling. If you’ve found someone you want to work with, you can hire them directly and then loop in the funeral home. Funeral directors are used to this. They’ll happily coordinate.

Either route is fine.

Step 2: Know What to Look For

Not every officiant is a celebrant, and not every celebrant is trained the same way. Before you reach out to anyone, here is what actually matters.

Formal training.

A trained celebrant has completed a recognized program, through the Celebrant Academy, the In-Sight Institute, the Academy of Modern Celebrants, or a comparable school, that covers the family interview, ceremony writing, ritual design, and how to hold a room through grief. Ask where they trained. A real celebrant will be glad you asked.

Certification, and an active practice.

Credentials matter, but so does whether the person is still actively doing the work. Someone who certified eight years ago and has officiated three services since is in a different place than someone walking with families on a regular basis. You want both.

Experience with the kind of service you need.

A funeral, a graveside service, a celebration of life held three months later, a memorial for a child, a service that needs to hold the complications of an estranged family or a hard death. These are not the same ceremony. Ask if your celebrant has held the kind of moment you are imagining.

Comfort with your family’s beliefs, whatever they are.

A trained celebrant should be able to build a service that is fully secular, openly religious, or thoughtfully both at once. Some families want Psalm 23 read by a granddaughter and a Stevie Ray Vaughan song as the recessional. Some want no scripture, only stories. Some want a smudging at the start of the service, or a Native blessing, or a tradition carried over from a grandparent’s country. The right celebrant takes all of that in stride and asks good questions about how to do it well.

A real sample of their work.

Ask to see or hear a sample ceremony, a eulogy they’ve written, or testimonials from families they have served. The writing is the work. If it doesn’t move you, keep looking.

Someone you actually want in the room.

This one is harder to put into words, but trust it when you feel it. You're inviting this person into one of the most sensitive moments of your family's life. They should feel like someone you can be real with, someone you trust with the private stories, the family complications, and whatever the goodbye is going to ask of you.

Step 3: Reach Out

Once you’ve found a celebrant who looks like a fit, send a short message. It doesn’t need to be polished. Most families write something like this:

“Hi, my mom passed on Tuesday. We are working with [funeral home] and the service is tentatively this Saturday. Are you available, and could we talk?”

That’s enough. The celebrant will take it from there.

A few things to know about reaching out:

• Response times are fast, and they should be. Email inquiries typically get a reply within a few hours. Phone calls and texts are usually answered immediately. If I'm leading a service or otherwise unavailable, you'll still hear back from me quickly with a short note letting you know when we can talk.

• There is no cost to a first conversation. You’re not signing anything by reaching out.

• You can reach out before you’re fully ready. If a loved one is in hospice, or the family is still scattered across the country, or you simply have not caught your breath yet, that’s fine. We can talk now and start the real work when you’re ready.

Step 4: The First Call, a Small Respite in a Hard Week

I meet with families by Zoom whenever I can.

This is intentional. The days right after a death tend to be a blur of phone calls and casseroles and people stopping by the house. The dining room table fills up with paperwork. Someone is on hold with the bank. Someone else is trying to find the right photo for the obituary. The pace is exhausting, and the house can start to feel like a waiting room.

A Zoom call gives the family a small pocket of quiet inside all of that. You don’t have to leave the house. You don’t have to clean up. You don’t have to be anywhere by anything o’clock. You can be in your pajamas. You can have your coffee. The dog can be in your lap.

And the invite is wide open. Whoever wants to be on the call is welcome. Spouse, children, siblings, the cousin in Arizona, the best friend who has been with the family since high school, the granddaughter who flew in from out of state. End-of-life ceremonies are never a one-person decision, and the more voices in the conversation, the truer the story becomes. I have had eight people on a Zoom from four time zones, all telling the same story slightly differently, and by the end we all knew exactly who we were honoring.

In person works too, of course. I travel across Central Michigan and beyond. But the Zoom option exists for a reason: it gives you a respite from the arrangements without asking you to take on another errand.

What the first call actually covers

The first conversation is usually fifteen or twenty minutes. It’s not the full family interview yet. That comes once we’ve agreed to work together. This call is just to figure out whether we're a fit.

• Who has died, or who is dying. Their name. A sense of who they were. What the family is hoping for.

• What kind of service you are imagining. Funeral, graveside, memorial weeks later, a full celebration of life. Religious, secular, blended. Indoor, outdoor, somewhere meaningful to them.

• Logistics. Date, time, location, funeral home if there is one, an estimated guest count.

• Fee and what is included. A trained celebrant will tell you their fee clearly, and exactly what it covers: the interview, the writing, the day-of service, and the follow-up.

• Whether to move forward. No pressure either direction. If we are not the right fit, I’ll point you toward someone who is.

If the conversation feels right, the next step is the family interview. That’s where the real work begins. And in my experience, that is also where families often start to feel a small, surprising sense of relief. The story of the person you love is finally in steady hands.

Step 5: Questions Worth Asking

Whether you are talking to me or another celebrant, here are the questions that get you the most useful answers.

• Where did you train, and when did you certify?

• How many end-of-life services do you lead in a typical year?

• Can you share a sample ceremony or eulogy, or a testimonial from a recent family?

• How do you handle a family that doesn’t share a single religious tradition, or no religion at all?

• Are you comfortable including cultural or family traditions that matter to us?

• What does your process look like from first call to ceremony day?

• Will I see the ceremony in writing before the service?

• What is your fee, and what does it include?

• Are you available on [date]?

You don’t have to ask all of them. Pick the three that matter most to you. The answers will tell you a lot.

Step 6: What Happens After You Say Yes

Once we have decided to work together, here is how the process unfolds. Other trained celebrants will work similarly.

The family interview.

Usually an hour. Sometimes longer. By Zoom, by phone, or in person, whichever feels easier on your family. Whoever wants to be there is welcome. We talk about the person who died. Not a checklist. A real conversation, with whatever stories and silences and laughter come up. I ask questions that open the real material: what they loved, what they were like at the kitchen table, what their hands did when they were happy, who they were before any of us knew them. By the end I have what I need to write a service that actually sounds like them.

Writing the ceremony from scratch.

Every word. The opening, the life tribute, the readings, the rituals, the closing. Not a template.

Building in what matters to you.

This is where personalization becomes the heart of the work. A favorite song. A poem. A scripture if scripture is meaningful to your family, or none of that at all. A candle lit by each grandchild. A memory table with the things they touched every day: the worn-out cap, the cribbage board, the carving knife, the rosary. A moment for grandchildren to step forward and speak. A reading in another language. A blessing from a tradition the family carries.

Cultural and family rituals belong in this conversation too, and I take them seriously. A smudging at the start of the service. An honor guard for a veteran, with the flag fold timed exactly right. A song that was sung at every family wedding, sung again now at the goodbye. A small object placed in the casket because that is what the family has always done. All of it is welcome. The ceremony stops being something happening to your family and starts being something your family is shaping with their own hands.

A draft for you to read before the service.

You see every word in advance. We revise together until it feels right. Nothing about your loved one will surprise you in front of a room of mourners.

Coordination with the funeral home.

I work directly with the funeral director on timing, processional, music cues, and any other logistics. Your family doesn’t have to manage that piece.

The service itself.

I arrive early. I greet your family. I lead the ceremony the way we built it together. If a moment runs long, if a child cries, if someone needs to step out for air, that’s fine. A well-trained celebrant will be skilled in handling these dynamics.

After.

I follow up. A note. A check-in. Whatever feels right for your family. Most families ask for a copy of the written ceremony to keep, and I always send one.

A Note on Working Through a Funeral Home

If the funeral home is the one introducing you to a celebrant, the logistics shift slightly but the work stays the same.

In most cases, the funeral home coordinates the introduction, shares the basic details of the service, and either includes the celebrant’s fee in your invoice or has you pay the celebrant directly. Both are common. Ask your funeral director which arrangement they use.

Several Central Michigan funeral homes I partner with regularly know exactly how this works, and they make it easy. If your funeral home is newer to working with celebrants, I’m glad to walk them through it. Funeral directors and celebrants are partners, not competitors. The families who get both win.

Red Flags

Most celebrants are doing this work for the right reasons. But you are hiring someone to stand at the front of one of the hardest days of your life, so a short watch-out list is worth having.

• No real training. “I have always loved public speaking” is not a credential. Ask where they trained.

• No sample of their work. A celebrant who can’t show you anything they have written is a celebrant who has not written much.

• No family interview, or a very short one. Fifteen minutes on the phone is not enough to write a meaningful ceremony.

• No draft shared with the family in advance. You should never hear the eulogy for the first time at the service.

• Pressure to add services you didn’t ask for. A good celebrant offers, never pushes.

• A worldview being slid in the service. If the celebrant’s personal beliefs keep showing up in a service, that’s a problem.

How Soon Should You Reach Out?

Honestly? As soon as you know you want a celebrant. Most services happen within a week of the death, and the writing process moves more gracefully the earlier I can start.

That said, I have been brought in less than 48 hours before a service and still built something the family was proud of. If the timing is tight, say so. A trained celebrant knows how to work inside that window without rushing the moment that matters.

And if you’re pre-planning your own ceremony, or organizing a service weeks or months after a loss, there’s no rush at all. We can take the time the work deserves.

Ready to Talk?

If you have read this far, you may be close to a decision: for someone you love, for someone who has just died, for yourself, or simply for the someday version of any of those. Whichever it is, I would be honored to hear about them.

There is no cost and no pressure on a first call. We meet by Zoom whenever it works, so you can sit at your own kitchen table, with your own coffee, with whoever in your family wants to be there. Or we meet in person, if that is what your family needs. Either way, the first conversation is yours. A small pocket of quiet inside whatever else the day holds.

• Reach out directly through my website at celebrantmichelle.com

• Send a message through social media

• Email or call. Contact info is on my site, and I respond personally to every inquiry.

Schedule a conversation →

We talk. You get a sense of how I work. You decide from there.

For Funeral Directors

If you are a funeral director in Central Michigan and you are thinking about adding a trained celebrant to your referral list, I would welcome the conversation. I work with funeral homes regularly, I understand your timelines, and I make your families’ experience better without making your day harder. Reach out the same way.

If This Work Is Quietly Calling You

Every so often, a reader lands on a post like this for a different reason. Not because they need to hire a celebrant, but because they are starting to wonder if they could be one.

If that is you, pay attention to it. I teach the End-of-Life Celebrant course at the Celebrant Academy. Six weeks of live instruction, twelve students per cohort, built for people who believe families deserve better goodbyes and are willing to do the work to deliver them.

Learn about the End-of-Life Celebrant course at the Celebrant Academy →

Michelle Sponseller is a Certified Master Celebrant and Certified Funeral Celebrant based in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. She specializes in personalized end-of-life ceremonies, religious, secular, and everything in between, and also officiates weddings and other life-milestone services. She serves as the End-of-Life Instructor at the Celebrant Academy.