His Web site says he'll do standup comedy, but Jim Rehnberg - "Rent a Rev" to those who acquire his professional ministerial services - has never done any.

Still, on a busy Saturday, he is something like a comedian working gig after gig after gig, at times bringing the house to tears and doing it with relatively the same material every single time.

"It just rounds out who I am," Rehnberg says of his standup services. "I just have more fun working with a couple and doing a wedding than anything."

But such a special occasion as a wedding is hardly the time to work in a bunch of ill-advised improv antics or tired, wise-crack standards like "take my wife... please." Rehnberg, the oldest son of a Baptist minister and a former one himself, understands this. That's why he has simply asked 3,000 grooms to take 3,000 brides as their lawfully wedded wives since he started marrying couples in 1983.

He has married couples in the bottoms of their basements. He has married couples at the top of the Navy Pier Ferris wheel. His favorite place to marry people, though, is right in the back yards of their homes.

"It's not a production. You're focused on the relationship," he says. "It's more about the bride and groom when it's in somebody's home."

From Wisconsin to Joliet, and Elburn to Lake Michigan, he has made more than a full-time job out of marrying men and women. There's a wedding business," he says. "Big time."

Rehnberg has a bachelor's degree in biblical studies from Wheaton College and a master's degree in pastoral ministry from Bethel Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minn.

"I was not ordained on the Internet," he says.

He had always wanted to be a minister, and people had always told him h should be one, but it just didn't work out. His first church split and, 15 years after he resigned from his second church in 1980 because his family of four "couldn't live on $220 a week," it shut down.

He then sold insurance for Northwestern Mutual and handled fundraising for Living Bibles Inc. until a neighbor asked Rehnberg to marry him in 1983. At that point, he began the "Rent a Rev" business on a part time basis.

Starting in 1985, he spent eight years working with his father-in-law for W.F. Braun as a manufacturers representative in the oil industry.

"And that's when I decided I would be the product," he says.

Jim Rehnberg, full-time "Rent a Rev," was born.

"That was a major turning point in my life," he says.

Now, with the federal trademark for "Rent a Rev" he was awarded in 1999, and the possibility he could be the basis for a sitcom character in the future, he books weddings sometimes 18 months in advance. He works 70 to 80 hours each week. He answers 25-30 phone calls a day, starting at 8:30 a.m. and tailing off around 8 p.m.

The "love bug," he says, bites on the weekend, which is when he's at his busiest. So his weekend falls on Wednesday, which is date night for him and Margy, his wife of 26 years.

Otherwise, Rehnberg's time is consumed with meetings that make things personal, rehearsals that make things perfect and weddings that make things permanent.

He averages four to six weddings each weekend, and has done as many as 13 on a holiday weekend. Those baffling numbers do not mean he gives couples the cattle treatment, though, herding them through without regard for who they are and where they came from.

Rehnberg logs eight to 10 hours of preparation for each wedding, and much of that time is reserved for meeting with couples in person and over the phone - which is typically where the deal starts and ends.

"I still have a pastor's heart and I'm very approachable. I have a good phone manner, and that usually seals what they've been told about me," he says, nothing the couples he marries typically learn of him through the 20 years of word-of-mouth references he has accumulated.

During meetings with couples, Rehnberg first establishes a comfort level with them, and then he learns about their lives and the lives of their loved ones so he can find ways within framework of a wedding ceremony to personalize each one.

"That's the unique specialty of every wedding, because it's the couple's," he says.

The most satisfying part of his job, Rehnberg says, is when a couple sits down with him and begins to open up to him.

He discovers people with varying religious backgrounds and varying expectations for how their weddings will go down.

"People with religious roots who are no longer active turn to me," he says.

He will perform "nonreligious" ceremonies, or ones in which references to God are minimal, but only after explaining to the couple the importance of God in his life and his relationship with his wife, because he wants them to understand his faith base.

"People often ask me, 'Well what are you?" My response is, 'I'm forgiven,'" Rehnberg says. "I come from a very Christian perspective."

However, he says, he doesn't come from a "legalistic, whining approach that isn't balanced with grace and mercy and love of God."

He says he is firmly rooted in what he believes is good and right, but flexible enough to meet people where they are and take that as an opportunity to tell them where his religion has brought them.

"Jesus met people right where they were."

Sometimes, though - like when he's asked to refer to God as "The Great Pumpkin" or when he's asked to do an Elvis impersonation for a Labor Day wedding - he must decline.

"I said no to that," he says. "First, I'm too short, and second, my hips are locked. I never learned to dance."

But special requests like those aren't the only stumbling blocks for Rehnberg. When it's quite apparent marriage is not the answer for a couple, he has turned them down before.

The Reverend jokes around at the Dost's wedding rehearsal

Then there are those he does marry, only to see the marriage end in divorce. He keeps track of them, in fact. He has a 40 percent divorce rate.

"I'm better than the national average," he says. "Actually, I'm not better. My couples are."

He used to take the divorces of couples he married personally. He saw them as failures. He has since changed his outlook.

Now he sees himself a communicator. His responsibility is to communicate truths regarding more than marriage, but life and family as well.

"A lot of couples think that having kids is no big deal when it's a huge deal," he says, noting many of the couples he has married have divorced and now are more concerned about blending than creating families.

Rehnberg will offer his insights before and after weddings, as couples often turn to him for advice and counseling down the line. Unfortunately, he says, he often is sought too late in the game.

"If I get a phone call, the bride and groom are hoping I can save their marriage from divorce. By the time they call me, I'm the last resort."

Weddings, marriage and family counseling and, of course, standup comedy aren't the only services "Rent a Rev" Rehnberg offers. He performs baptisms, baby dedications, house blessings and funerals.

"I've buried several grandmothers that were smitten by me at weddings, and I've also buried children of people that I've married," he says.

He said he basically is invited to involve himself in the lives of people in a pastoral way without being a pastor, which is a job he doesn't miss.

"I, frankly, get to jump in in the special times when the church can't or won't go," Rehnberg says. "I get to fulfill that which would be left as a vacuum."