SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to another episode, the place where we talk about kids' ministry and take a peek behind the scenes. We try to share a little bit of what we've learned that works for us and some of our failures so that you can avoid them. We release a new episode every Friday, and this is your backstage pass to see the magic or disaster that happens behind the scenes of our kids' ministry. I'm your host, Gabe Baker, and today I'm joined by Brother Steve Arter. How are you doing, Steve? Hey, good morning. Great. All right, well, let's get into today's topic. You want to introduce that? Yeah. Getting into character. You know, it's important for us as the leaders and the actors and children's ministers not to just kind of go with what we know, but actually get into the character that we are. I mean, I'm an elderly guy, so I play the Isaacs and the Abrahams and the father figures and sometimes the voice of God, but it's important... that we actually get into who we are so so the kids can you know really grasp it and get our emotion absolutely yeah i agree you know everyone loves a good story and i've i've heard the argument or read the argument that can be made that it's not so much the plot but the characters in a story that make it interesting yeah and of course we use stories and characters heavily in our sunday school we act out bible stories nearly every sunday and of course many times we're We run a Bible story series. We're doing that right now. And then we have our themes. So our themes are typically separate from the Bible stories, and they have their own cast of characters. And then while performing various characters can be fun, and it can be silly sometimes, there is a deeper reason we do it. Yeah, of course. And we do it to reach the kids. And so kind of, I guess, first off is stories. You know, everybody loves stories, right? Good story, bad story. Yeah. And often if I'm leading in our segments, if I'm leading the Bible story portion of it, I'll come out and the kids know what I'm about to say. And I'll come out like, who loves stories? Who loves Bible stories? They know I'm going to say that every time. And you get some, quote, cool kids that don't want to admit they love stories. And I try to convey that everybody actually loves stories. It might not be you know, air quotes again, amateur storybook, like Three Little Pigs. Right. But people, you know, we don't watch movies here, but people watch movies as a story. Right. People listen to audio. That's, you know, books. That's a story. And so everybody loves stories of some kind. There's not anybody that doesn't. And so stories draw people in. And so this is one of the reasons we use stories. And we, it's a blast. We love it. Yeah. And we uh, invite the kids and integrate the kids into the story. Yeah. That gives them, you know, I'm, I'm really part of something. I was part of the story this week. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. You know, we're talking about character today and, and, you know, we've mentioned stories because it's so intertwined, but characters can reinforce or even be the story.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

I agree. Yeah. And so like when we tell, I'll just use an example. We've done several times the Good Samaritan. In fact, you're usually the Good Samaritan. And so, maybe that fatherly figure and then you're big enough to be able to pick somebody up a little bit and help them. We embellish a little bit on, like, we typically, the bandits are a big part of the story.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Like, they're usually the kickoff of the story. Yes, yes. And we've done it before, like, so in our Sunday school, one of our segments, often we will have what I call dynamic opening. And the dynamic opening, the idea is as kids are coming up to be seated in Sunday school, there's something happening on stage. So they're not walking into a quiet room. I mean, we always have music playing, but they're not walking in and there's something happening. And so they're like, what is that? And it's often a preview of the Bible story. Gets their attention right away. Gets their attention. Yeah. We've done it where the bandits, we've even had them where they had a whiteboard up on stage. Right. Right. Yeah, I do. And they're planning their attack. They're planning their ambush. The kids are like, what's happening? And then we do the Bible story way later on in Sunday school, time-wise. But it kind of sets it up a little bit. Sure. So having said all that, the bandits are kind of a major... They don't necessarily have names in the storyline, but they are major characters. And then we go through each of the... What is it? The priest and the Levite and then the Good Samaritan. And then another... peripheral set of characters that are major is we usually have an innkeeper and an assistant. If we're going all out with the whole cast, that's what we have. And so the Good Samaritan finally picks up the spoiler alert, helps the traveler. Oh, I guess that's the other thing, the main character, the traveler. But helps the traveler, brings him to the hotel, which I think is kind of more like a hospital in biblical times. So it brings him there. So that's a story of you know, full of characters that we try to add flavor to. They have costumes. There might be times when we have the kids be bandits too, you know? Yeah. So I think, I think the characters are important with that. Well, you know, it gives the kids, you know, when we do a dynamic opening like that and they see just a portion of it, it gives them a little bit of anticipation or. Exactly. It draws them in. Yeah. It draws them in. So when we do get to the, you know, you usually do the narrative. And then you wrap it up by, hey, you want to see what happens? And then they're like, oh, yeah. And then the bandits come in and do their thing. So even though they're not directly involved, they've been involved since the beginning because of the dynamic opening. Yeah, so they're a part of it, which is what we kind of, when I'm explaining our Sunday school to someone that doesn't know anything about church, I tell them it's Sunday school, but then I explain it's an interactive theater.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Yeah, same. So

SPEAKER_00 6:29

why are characters important? And I think we kind of just covered some of them, but, but a couple of things that I wrote down is just kids. They love characters. If you think about, you know, I don't want to get in trouble here, but Disney, you know, okay. And not that we're fans, but the characters, or if you think of, I don't know, Narnia or talking animals, the kids are, the kids love that. I mean, adults do too, but you know, the colorful costumes and, Oh, yeah. It draws them in. It draws them in, and it gets their attention. And that is kind of, I don't want to jump too far ahead of myself, but what I mentioned about there's a deeper reason we use characters. It's not just about fun. It draws them in, and now we have their attention to tell them about the Holy Ghost. Right. Now we have their attention to tell them the plan of salvation. Yes. And another thing that's important is getting into character. You want to really get the kids 100%. You have to take them through every emotion of it. And that's up to us as actors. We start out with a dynamic opening. We know that there's an antagonist and a protagonist and kids don't know that stuff. All they know is, man, there's some bad guys and some good guys. But if we take them through every emotion of the whole story, that's, I mean, we're not actors by any means, but we get involved in the story and we are able to go through it. through every emotion and we can, for lack of a better term, drag the children in there with us. And then that, that kind of sets them up for ultra call because, because that is sometimes an emotional time. And if we coach them through the emotions of the story, you know, we're, we're priming them. Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. I, yeah, I agree. I think you, uh, you have to own it. Like, like kind of, yeah, you had to be that character. So a few types of characters. that we have that I just, I kind of try to do a list. It's not comprehensive necessarily, but I'm going to run through them. Then we can talk about them a little bit. So I have Bible characters, obviously. And so Bible characters could be general actors, kind of like the bandits I talked about. It can be leading role roles, like the traveler, for example, it can be first person accounts. I want to talk about that a little bit. So it can be somebody that was in the story and they're giving a first person account. We don't do that as often. A lot of times we're just acting it out. And then we have theme characters. And so with our themes, we have a storyline. And so with our theme characters, we have a hero. We'll have a nemesis, the antagonist and protagonist. And then we have often we'll have a leading lady. So many of our Bible stories are all about men. So that's an opportunity to really have a leading lady. And then, of course, a dunce. And often it'll be the dunce on the good guy side and a dunce on the bad guy side. The kids just love the dunce. And then we also have segment characters. And what I mean by segments is we have, you know, portions of our script that we do every week, the building blocks that the script is built on, like Offering, Memoryverse, Plan of Salvation. And so often we do groups of three or something, three people come out and do Memoryverse, so we have segment characters. And then finally we have characters that I say they transcend themes and so one we haven't had in a while both of these that I just kind of jotted down we haven't had in a while we're going to bring them back but Captain John and so Brother Keech is our typically our evil nemesis but Captain John is a really good guy and he has transcended themes so he started way back in some kind of military thing we had and then he like came in in the middle of a medieval theme in his camo outfit. And then we have a character that many kids were scared to death of for a while, but Ruth Less. We haven't seen her in a long while. We haven't seen her in a long time. She was very, very loosely based on, I don't even really know about this character, but very loosely based on the character Carmen Sandiego. Flashbacks. Yeah, so my understanding and I don't know very well, but my understanding is Carmen Sandiego is like a Some kind of thief that steals. It's to teach history, I think. Yeah, I think so. And she steals monuments. A long time ago. Anyway, so it was very loosely. So Ruthless is a master thief. And we had her dressed kind of like the Carmen Sandiego character, but all black. And I do want to jump back to these other characters. But one thing about Ruthless that made her so good is the kids didn't know who played her. Yeah. Because her face was covered. And so I think that. That unknown made some of the kids really scared of her. And then she always would be in and out fast. We'd plan it out. She would be in and out. We'd chase her, and she's gone. So anyway, those are some of the types of characters that we have. So let's kind of run through some of those. I think that with the Bible characters, we kind of talked about that a little bit. But I don't know. Do you have anything to add there as far as, I mean, we do costumes. You know, I've been the bad guy, Dallas Clay. Oh, yes. You know, and we did the Western theme. And it's kind of easy to be a bad guy. It is. Yeah, it's kind of fun. You know, you get the gravelly voice or, you know, you grab a kid when you're going up to the stage. And it's important because, you know, sometimes the kids will see him at Safeway. You know, the kids that come on the bus and they're like, hey, mom, that's Pharaoh. Oh, yeah. That's Dallas Clay. And they'll give me a big hug. Yeah. So, You know, I mean, I get into it. Yeah. You know, whether you're a good guy or a bad guy, the kids, you know, the kids will remember you when they see you out at Safeway or Penny Playground. So I got to tell you, this reminded me. So I just did, I was at the Kingdom Kids Conference, which is a big children's conference. And I was the leader of the Bad Knights. We had Eel King, Brother Larry Booker. The younger brother, Larry Booker. But I was the leader of the Bad Knights. And I was the only one that had a mask on. I had a little bit of a mask. It was just like a robber's mask that covers the eyes. So, we're in altar service like the second night. It's three nights. And the second night, altar service is wrapping up. And this boy comes up to me and he's looking at me. And I can see him out of the corner of my eye. So, I look over and put my arm around him. He's like... are you Malador? And I just looked at him and I was like, oh, that couldn't be me, could it? I'm in my regular clothes. And I looked away and I could see him looking at me still and I'm starting to walk away. He's like, you are, you are. Yeah, that's hilarious because even the kids in our Sunday school, I'll see them Sunday night and they'll say, oh, you were Pharaoh or you were this or you were that. And I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. I was a brother art or in Sunday school. So it's funny. It is. So I remember one theme we did, we're going to do it again actually here next year, but the spy theme. And so the spy theme we had, well, kind of like we're in the pirate theme now. So it's kind of like that, but it was a lot more pronounced, I think, but everybody had their good character and their bad character.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Bishop and Kroger.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

Yeah. So I remember you were Kroger. Kroger, which was the right-hand man of the evil nemesis, Mr. King. And so Kroger was kind of a military style guy. He had a scar and an eye patch. And so I remember you in the morning, we were doing bus pickup at least once, maybe more than once, but you dressed up as Kroger as the kids were getting on the bus. So that's cool. I think I did that with Narnia too when I was the Aslan. Aslan, oh, did you? Yeah, I wore the costume on the bus. So they loved it. That's awesome. Yeah. And then I want to go back and we're kind of, I meant to talk about Bible characters, but we'll come back to that. But with the theme that you mentioned, Dallas Clay, that one was a little bit of a unique theme because what we did with that, it was a Western thing, but it was focused on the disciples. All the disciples were cowboys. And so it was, it was actually a 16 week theme. And of course we know there's 12 disciples, but some disciples got more attention than others. Peter got a couple of weeks. you know and different things so so that was a different or a more unique theme but it was cool in that you had like the theme was western and it crossed over into the bible right characters because they were cowboys and so just wanted to mention that it was kind of neat um most often like right now most often our theme characters and our bible story characters are completely separate and so we have right now we have our pirate it's pirates and navy And so everybody has their theme character, like your Captain Patch for the pirates and Brother Keech is the first mate, Scar, all of that. And then Jimmy, Betty, there's some people on the Navy ship. But then some of those same people and some different people, as we're doing Bible stories, like we're doing a few different Bible stories, but we're focusing on Joseph quite a bit. We're doing a series on him. And so we do have a main Joseph and then Pharaoh, your Pharaoh. Right. But- those other characters are not, you know, the same as a theme has nothing to do with the theme. Right. Okay. So let's just drop back a little bit to the characters. I want to talk about first person. And so I know you mentioned on another podcast a little bit, but I want you to just talk about that centurion again, you did the first person account. Yeah. First person account. So, you know, it was before we had the, you know, elaborate set and it was just all plywood and bear up here, but, but I, I, did the the story on the the centurion's account and his narrative on what was happening and driving the stakes and finally at the end i mean it's really kind of emotional when you think about it because if you're looking at it from his point of view

SPEAKER_01 17:14

right

SPEAKER_00 17:14

it's like man what did we

SPEAKER_01 17:17

do yeah

SPEAKER_00 17:18

he realized he realized man surely this is the son of god you know and and that's why you know when i talked about early on getting into your character yeah and putting your in the place at the foot of the cross with the blood dripping down and the darkness and all that. And if we can do that, it draws the kids in. And just telling that story from the centurion's point of view is, I mean, it was moving for me as I was doing it, but when the kids are starting to tear up and cry, it's really powerful. And that's why I'm just so for being into your character. Yeah. Because you can draw the kids in with you. Yeah. I don't know if that answered the question. No, that's good. I like that because what I wanted to mention is this is a little bit, this is not in our bullet points or outline, but I advocate for practice if you can. I know that there's situations where you can't, but I advocate for practice. And part of it is not just the blocking the state, you know, where are we going to be on stage or how I'm going to save my life. Part of it is the collaboration. And here's what I mean by that is we use comedy quite a bit and it's fun. But if we can know as a team, our staff, and this is if you are running a larger staff, we run 10 on a Sunday is kind of our target. If the staff knows, hey, okay, we're doing this funny bit. All right, great. Okay, everybody's on board. This is a funny bit where we're going to have these characters come in. But we know like, hey, so at the Bible story at this point, it's going to lead right into all the call the centurion is going to come out and it's going to be serious so we can stage the kids for that and be in the right mood as a team because I have seen it where there's been a mistake and And there's something the actor is into it, like you're saying. And they're trying to portray that. But there's been so much comedy, or the comedy is the overlay, and it's missed. And then when they maybe are saying something sad or their voice cracks on purpose because they're supposed to be sad and emotional, instead the kids read it as funny. Yeah. And so that's a mistake. And it's hard to recover from that. And it's hard to recover. Yeah, it is very difficult to. bring it back because kids love to laugh and we're all about that but in the same way that we talk about you know if you can grab their attention and now you can teach them and brother Philip Booker taught an awesome lesson on that here for our staff in that same way if your character like the Roman centurion can you know have their emotions like where they are understanding and realizing oh wow this is serious then now you also have the opportunity to pray with them and for them to be, you know, touched by God. So, let's talk about how to create characters a little bit. So, we got a couple bullet points left, but I just, I want to help anybody that maybe this is foreign or new or just, they just want some ideas. We're not the character kings. Right. That would have been a good alliteration. You're right. We're not the character kings, but we, and we're not the best at this, but we do this a lot. So, just from what we've learned. So, So going back to stories, you've got to know your storyline. We have, our storylines are continuous. And so we typically or often do 16 week themes. This one was 15, just because of the way the calendar falls in different events that we have. So we often do 16 weeks. Well, each of those, the storyline has moved forward. It's like 16 chapters in the story. And so the kids know that there's this continuous story happening. And so I think that's key is having a story. And then I wrote this note i didn't know if you would understand it when i sent it to you but generate a caricature of your character's personality and so what i mean like a caricature in drawing is where you exaggerate somebody you know somebody like i have kind of a longer nose right so my nose would be exaggerated long or if somebody has more pronounced ears drawing a cartoon caricature of yourself yeah exactly and so it's exaggerated but yet you can tell who that person If it's done well. guy captain patch is the captain and he's a quote-unquote bad guy just because he's a pirate but well i don't want to give too much away in case kids listen to this but he's not super bad deep down we'll leave it at that there's hope for him there's hope and so but scar i don't know if there's any hope but so scar has this sidekick and it's it's brother brennan's character and his name is scab totally appropriate yes and so not very subtly right and so scab his character and the caricature of his character is that he is not admittedly trying to be like scar but he is trying to be like scar so scar comes in and does something and scab follows him around and acts just the same way but he's clumsy and he fails miserably and scar like looks at him almost in disdain like what are you doing all right get out of here the other thing is like uh develop key elements for your character and stick to them. So Captain John, um, that was one of our ongoing characters that just kind of transcended themes. So Captain John is a super good hearted guy, you know, for a captain from the army. We don't know what army, we don't know if he still works for the army. He's just, yeah, he's just some kind of army captain, but he's super good natured and he's really, he's silly. He's not really a dunce, but he's And he's really fun. Just a good hearted guy. Yeah, good hearted. And then so a couple of the things that we did, basically, Captain John gets lost. So he can't find his way out of a paper sack. But he doesn't know that. Right. And so those are like, both of those are kind of key elements. So he gets lost, but he doesn't know he gets lost. And so he's always saying, he rescues us, you know, from whatever, you know, if we get captured by whatever, he comes and rescues us. And so, he's like, I'll lead the way. And we're like, oh, Captain John, are you sure? Do you know the way? Yeah, because we all know. We want the kids to know, like, oh, Captain John. They're like, no, not Captain John. And so, he gets us lost, you know. But then the other key thing is he's not afraid of anything. And this actually developed because we went through a little period where kids were just, whenever we had bad guys, they just got super scared. And even now, once in a while, we'll have kids get scared of something that do with our theme because we have a lot of soundtracks and stuff but we just went through like a season of it and so i was trying to battle that and so we had captain john who they loved and he wasn't scared of anything right you know and then we started we basically kind of started making our bad guys bumbling idiots to make the kids not scared of them you know but anyway so that was those were like with captain john that was like some of the elements and then going back to our spy theme It kind of fit with Spies, but each character had like a specialty.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

And so we were able to kind of reinforce that. And so the kids kind of knew. And then I think they might have had their own little entrance music. So anytime, you know, Mr. King comes in. The kids knew. Yeah, the kids knew. They hear the music. Here comes Mr. King. He's the evil guy. So know your storyline and then have that caricature, that personality. Develop those key elements. The other thing is, like in the storyline, you can create circumstances that reinforce those character elements. So like Captain John, we can create a situation where we have to use his no fear. Or we can create a situation where he's going to get lost. And it can even lead us to, we've done cliffhangers where this week we're lost, come back next week to see if we get out of it. And so that's some of the ways to create character So let's just kind of do a quick recap. Yeah. Everybody loves stories. Everybody, even the actors. Even the actors love the stories. Even the actors love the stories. Their alter egos. Yeah. And if someone were to look at our script, our casting list for a script on any given Sunday, we have it in, it's basically an Excel sheet that's put out as a PDF. They would look at that if they didn't see the names of people and they just saw the characters, they would think that we had, you know 27 staff right so that's the other thing that's fun is our our staff gets to double up and change do quick changes and so and so it keeps us on our toes gives a whole new meaning to wearing multiple hats yeah literally literally we've even had it where in practice we're like oh you're gonna have to put that costume over that one so that you can go backstage throw that one off and go back out yeah yeah yeah so everybody loves the story and so So use stories if you can. And this is, you know, I'm kind of thinking of themes when I say this, but even I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that every Sunday school does Bible stories. Now, every Sunday school might not act them out, but you're probably doing a Bible story if you do a Sunday school. If you can, act it out. And if you're in a smaller situation, you can use kids. Oh, yeah. You know, to act it out. If you have a small class. classroom it's just a few people use kids you know if you're in a classroom you're the teacher and you got three kids use one child to help you or use the whole classroom yeah to help act it out and they experience about a story it's a different dynamic obviously but it can be used and then kids love characters and it keeps their attention this is why we feel in our Sunday school why it's so important to use them yeah is it keeps their attention it draws them in to the story and then there's several different different kinds of characters you can use, Bible story characters, the theme that you're doing, going back again, story. If you can have a continuous story, plan out how long your story is going to be and what your theme characters are doing. And then segment characters. If you have segments at all, which even if you don't call them that, and maybe you don't even do this style, you probably have some form of, like maybe you have an object lesson time, and maybe you have a snack time, and maybe, you know, whatever, however you do it in your Sunday school, if you have the staffing for it, you know, have your snack people come in and they're a character, you know, it's like, oh yeah, cook Betty comes in and she's delivering snack, you know, it just, it adds a little bit. And that, you know, that's a good way to teach the loaves and the fishes too. Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Yes. So that could be, that could be a character. Yeah. And then the key to creating good characters, last bullet point is to know your storyline and that's kind of what I was talking And that goes with Bible story as well. I, in our script, I find the Bible story in the Bible. Even if I feel like I know it, I put the reference in there so that our staff can quickly reference it. Like, you know, cause you know how it is like, where's that story again? And so I know it's in Genesis, but where, you know? And so like, okay, Genesis 39, Joseph, whatever. And so that the staff, even if we're doing a script run through, sometimes they're pulling it up on their phone. Oh yeah, I do. You want to make sure you get it. When I'm doing the voice of God, I want to make sure that I'm not doing Steve's paraphrase. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, okay. Well, I think that's about it. Use characters. Get into character. Get into your character. That'll bring the kids in. Yeah. All right.

UNKNOWN 30:04

Well, that's a wrap.