Non-Religious Funeral Program

Three secular orders of service

All three are complete and ready to use. Names, towns and venues are invented. Delete anything you do not want; nothing here holds up anything else.

A note on the moment of silence. It is one line on the page and it solves most of the problem this page exists for. Religious guests use it to pray, everyone else uses it to think, and nobody is made to say words they do not mean. Print it exactly as above, with the second line in smaller type.

Open sharing is warmer than it sounds on paper, and it is also the part most likely to run long. Ask two people privately in advance to speak first, so the silence at the start does not stretch. If you want more of this format, our celebration of life program page is built around it, and there are further worked examples in celebration of life program examples.

You are allowed to do less than you think

Without hymns and liturgy there is genuinely less to organize, and the temptation is to fill the gap. Do not. A fifteen-minute graveside service followed by food at somebody’s house is a real funeral, and people will remember it as one. If you are exhausted, cut the second reading, cut the third speaker, and print one sheet instead of four panels. Nobody counts.

Religious wording and what to use instead

Most funeral stationery and most funeral home templates are written on a Christian frame, and the phrases arrive by default. This is the whole list of swaps, in the order you will meet them.

One more thing worth catching. Funeral home order forms often carry a default line such as “The family thanks you for your prayers.” Change it to “The family thanks you for being here.” before you approve the proof. It is the single most commonly missed line, because nobody wrote it and so nobody reads it.

Cover, inside and back panel wording

Secular covers do well with restraint: a photograph, the name in full, two dates, and the place. If you want a line, take it from the readings rather than from a card shop.

The inside left panel is the place for the short life story, if you want one. Two hundred words is plenty on a folded program, and it gives guests something to read while the room fills.

The back panel carries the thanks and the practical details. Keep it to three short blocks so it can be read standing up.

If you would rather not build the panels yourself, the layout in our funeral program template takes any of this wording as-is, and funeral program size covers how much text actually fits on each fold.

Readings that carry weight without faith

These are old enough to reprint in full on a program without asking anyone. They are short, they read aloud well, and none of them mentions God.

There is also Death Is Nothing At All by Henry Scott Holland, the passage beginning “I have only slipped away into the next room.” It is freely reprintable and enormously popular, and it is worth knowing that it comes from a sermon, so a few lines late in the full text are explicitly religious. Families who want it at a secular service normally read the first half and stop. Read it through before you decide.

Short lines for a cover, a card or a slide

• “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

  Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground

  The most-used secular funeral line, and it earns it.

• “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.”

  George Eliot, Adam Bede

  Good on the back panel, above the thanks.

• “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.”

  Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

  For a gardener, a farmer, or a green burial.

• “Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.”

  Emily Dickinson

  Ten words. Fits on a bookmark or a prayer card.

• “Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

  William Shakespeare, Cymbeline

  Steadier and less sentimental than most cover lines.

• “Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail.”

  John Milton, Samson Agonistes

  Suits a long life that ended the way the person wanted.

Modern poems you can name but should not reprint

Several of the poems most requested at secular funerals are still under copyright, including She Is Gone by David Harkins and Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, whose authorship has been disputed for decades. Reading one aloud at a private service is not the same as reprinting it on a hundred programs. The practical answer is to print the title and the author, list the reader underneath, and leave the text off the page. Our funeral poems page groups more of them by relationship and marks which ones can be reprinted in full.

Music, silence and the moment people dread

Without hymns, music is the only thing in the room that everyone experiences at once, so it does more work than usual. Three pieces is the standard load: something as people come in, something in the middle, and something at the end.

Pick the middle one carefully. It is played in silence, with nobody speaking and nothing to look at, and it is where most of the crying happens. Some families want that and choose the song deliberately. Others put a short slideshow behind it so people have somewhere to look, which changes the feeling of those three minutes completely. Either is a real choice; the one to avoid is not choosing.

On the program, print the title in quotation marks and the performer underneath, and add a line telling people what to do: please stay seated, or please join in if you know it. Guests at a service with no liturgy genuinely do not know whether to stand, and they will follow whatever the page says.

The exit music is worth a moment too. It is the last thing anyone hears and it sets the tone of the room they walk into. Something the person actually liked beats something solemn they never played.

Who leads a service with no minister

Somebody has to hold the room, say the next thing, and keep it moving. Three options, in rough order of how much weight they take off the family.

A celebrant. Civil and humanist celebrants do this full time. They meet the family, usually for an hour or two, write the tribute from what you tell them, and lead the service. Funeral homes keep lists; ask for one directly rather than accepting a chaplain by default. This is the option that lets the family sit down and be mourners rather than hosts.

The funeral director. Many will lead a short secular service themselves, particularly at a graveside. They are calm, they know the venue and the timings, and they will not make it religious if you ask them not to. Ask early; not every director offers it.

A family member or friend. This is common and it works, with one caution: the person leading cannot also be the person most likely to break down. Choose the steady cousin, the colleague, the friend who runs meetings. Give them a printed order with every name spelled out phonetically, and tell them it is fine to stop and start again. If they also want to speak, our eulogy examples include several with no religious content at all.

When the family is split on religion

This is the real difficulty behind most searches for a secular program, and it is rarely about theology. It is usually one grandparent who cannot imagine a funeral without the Lord’s Prayer, and one adult child who cannot bear to hear it.

A few things that hold up in practice.

What does not work is putting a hymn in to keep the peace and then having half the room sit through it in silence. It satisfies nobody and it is visible.

If the balance tips the other way and the service will have real religious content after all, the structure is different enough that you are better off starting from the Christian funeral program and cutting, rather than starting here and adding. The general order of service page covers what the standard slots are called either way.

Before you print

One last practical note. The program is the object most families keep, and it is the one thing that ends up in a drawer for thirty years. That is a reason to get the names right and a reason not to over-design it. Plain type, one good photograph, and accurate details will outlast any decorative border.

Reposa will lay the whole thing out from your answers, with no religious content unless you ask for it: the order of service, the short life story, the readings, matching cards and a slideshow, all in one package. If the gathering you are planning is less a funeral than an afternoon of remembering, start instead with how to plan a celebration of life.