Most of the time I like to put something on here that you could replicate that day and use in your youth ministry. Today I am posting something that will take some time. It’s called a “rock opera.” Essentially you act out what a recorded narrator is saying and then when you have a line to “speak” you are lip-syncing to a song lyric. The lyric is typically pretty short.

Every story is as different as you want to make it. Writing and recording this does take quite a bit of time. You will need to have time to rehearse as well. Depending on how many characters you have in your story it could take longer. You typically want to have your most enthusiastic “actors” involved in this. They will make it the most fun to watch, as an audience member.

If you only have 2 or 3 characters, you can sometimes get away with practicing just a few times. I do recommend a good amount of practice though. In today’s post I am going to give you a freebie. This is an already recorded rock opera that we used with our middle school ministry. I have adjusted parts of it to be more generic so anyone can use it. When we had it there were some specific names for our leaders in particular. I am also going to include a PDF file with the script written out for you.

A couple of suggestions:

  • Enunciate: open your mouth wide when you are lip-syncing so that it is clear what you are singing.
  • Don’t turn toward the other characters in the rock opera. Face the audience. Turn your body slightly toward the character you are interacting with, but if you face them and not your audience they will miss what you are saying.
  • Be as expressive with your face and your body as possible. Over act.
  • Have fun!

The story you are getting today is about a new kid in school that tries desperately to fit in with the different groups at school, but finds no one until he meets the youth group students. They invite him to youth group and he gets connected.

We used this for our kick-off to small groups. It was a ton of fun for both the leaders and the students. We used all of our volunteers as actors for this one, as it was an “ad” for our small group ministry. Hope you enjoy it.

I would love to hear if you use it and how it goes.

Download the audio track here then download the PDF script here.