How do people expect a church to keep going for 3 occasions in a lifetime?

It set me thinking how strange it is that a man who had never set foot in his village church should wish to have his funeral service there. Churches are used 3 times it seems, wedding, christening & funeral. At the first two, solemn vows are made which people have no intention of keeping-at the last trump I suppose there’s a glimmer of hope of everlasting life in a sort of heaven. Can you explain it? How do people expect a church to keep going for 3 occasions in a lifetime? A sort of superstition, a leftover from childhood? It soon won’t be that as few children are taken to church in the way that our generation was.

Deborah to Diana, 3 September 1999, ed. C. Mosley, The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters (2007), 876