From the seating of wedding guests in the pews to the entrance of the bride and groom, every wedding ceremony demands a certain amount of choreography and placement in order to run successfully. In order to organize your event, you may wish to follow some traditional guidelines for seating arrangements, procession, ceremony formation, and recession. You can choose to conduct your ceremony in a new way, but be sure to ask the officiant if he or she is agrees to the variations before enacting them.

At a formal Christian wedding or a large civil ceremony, the bride’s family and friends sit on the left, and the groom’s family sit on the right. Decorate the first few rows with flowers or ribbon to indicate seating for immediate family and whichever special guests you may have included. As long as they can maintain civility, divorced parents may sit together in the front row. If they are remarried or would prefer to sit separately, the father and his wife should sit in the third row. The ushers will seat guests as they arrive, from front rows to back. The final guests to be seated are grandparents, mother of the groom, the groom's father, and just before the couple makes their appearance, the mother of the bride.