Imagine the impact of puppets teaching biblical truths. Through television, puppetry has become part of our popular culture. It is proven effective in teaching children letters, numbers, and values.
A great ministry team needs effective leadership and dedicated members. A systematic approach to rehearsals and performing assure continued success.
Since 1999, I have been using puppets to minister to boys and girls and men and women around the world. I am convinced that puppets are a great way of teaching boys and girls, men and women, people of all ages about the good news of Jesus Christ. Puppetry has been used to captivate audiences for ages. You see, puppetry is not just for children, it’s for adults too.
Puppets are very popular in churches today and they’ve been used in ministry for centuries. In fact, the string puppets we know as marionettes a word that means “little Mary” got their name because they were used in church nativity plays.
So what is puppet ministry?
It can be a number of things. It can be one Sunday school teacher using a small puppet in a classroom to tell a Bible story.
It can be a group of teenagers directed by adults who use puppets to perform skits and songs in their community, in their church or anywhere they have the opportunity, or it can be a number of children or teens or adults in children’s church from week to week. They use puppets to tell Bible stories, to sing songs and to interact with the children.
There are many different styles of puppets in ministry. The most common type of puppet is the moving mouth style hand puppet. This is what we use in our ministry.
Other puppet teams use black-light puppets, marionettes and some even use dowels.
If your puppet team is truly going to be an effective ministry, you have to take some time to figure out what God’s purpose is for you.
Maybe he wants you to be involved in children’s church right there in your own congregation, or maybe he’s got some outreach he wants you to do.
Maybe he wants you to take that puppet team to the senior citizen homes or to the inner city, or take a trip and perform in other churches.
After you have figured out that purpose, try to write it down. Put It on paper, pray about it. Allow God to talk to you. A sample mission statement might go something like this, “to train and disciple our churches, youth for ministry, and to creatively present the Gospel to those outside our church.”
One thing every puppet ministry needs is a good leader.
Somebody who knows where he’s going and how to get there. It’s tough for one person to direct a whole group of puppeteers all by themselves. It helps when there are other leaders, leaders.
How many leaders? One good rule of thumb is a one to six ratio. One leader for every six puppeteers. That way your assistant directors can help you with all the jobs that need to be done.
Those assistant leaders can do things like leading devotions or running sound and lights, maybe even prop making anything. You see, it helps when that leader does not have to do things all by himself.
Plan on having regular meetings with your assistant directors talk and pray together about everything you’re planning to do. The more help you have from assistant leaders, the more sanity you’re going to retain and the longer your ministry will be able to function.
Once your leadership team is in place, the next thing you’re going to need is puppeteers. Almost anyone can learn to become a puppeteer. Some puppet teams are made up of kids from the youth group. Some are made up of older children while others are made up of committed adults.
Last year, my twins started to help with the puppets during VBS programs. They were 8 at the time. They helped by adding more puppets to the show during songs. In the past year, they have really gotten better and better.
In some churches, we have taken young teens and shown them how to use puppets and used them in our VBS program at their own church. This lead to one church starting their own puppet ministry.
There really is no perfect age for a puppeteer. However, puppet teams usually work best when everyone is about the same age. This makes it easier to select the height of the puppet stage so that everyone can perform easily.
It’s worth mentioning that some younger children may have difficulty operating the puppets. Puppet Ministry is a very physically demanding activity and some younger kids may have trouble holding their arms up for longer periods of time. We found it best to work with boys and girls about fifth or sixth grade and older. That would be about age 11 or 12 many of these puppeteers have continued to work with the puppet team throughout their high school years.
Try to select puppeteers who can make their puppet ministry involvement a high priority. It’s okay to have busy people as long as they can commit to regular team rehearsals and performances. There are certain types of people who often are drawn to puppet ministry. Sometimes those who are shy find they can excel at puppetry because they’re able to be behind the curtain and where the crowd does not intimidate them.
Sometimes people who like music but can’t sing or play an instrument really excel at puppetry because they can have their puppets do the singing. Those who like drama and acting also can make really good puppet puppeteers.
Ideally, you want puppeteers who are dependable, enthusiastic, teachable, and willing to work hard. Every puppet team needs to have a well defined set of policies. The most important policy is the policy regarding attendance. You must have regular attendance at your practices. Personally, if you want to have a successful puppet team, the team needs to know what is expected.
I need to be put on paper and everything. Your team needs to understand your expectations.
Rehearsal is very important to putting on a great presentation. Each puppeteer needs to know the script and when their puppet is to appear.
If the puppet is singing along with music, puppeteers need to know the words and voices in the song to make their puppet respond accordingly.
If you are using prerecorded scripts, your puppeteers need to know the script so their puppet can “lip-sync” the words. It also helps to have printed scripts in front of the puppeteers when using pre-recorded scripts.
Puppetry is a great way to minister to all ages and a well-run puppet ministry can be a blessing to any church. If you need help starting a puppet ministry in your church, or training volunteers, we are available to come to your church and help.
Be sure to check out my other article on STARTING A PUPPET MINISTRY.
