When I first came to the parish in 2003, I was blessed to start a youth program from scratch.  Coming from a very small parish back home I knew the one thing that the youth did was a Living Stations of the Cross.  Everyone gets dressed, one guy is asked to be Jesus, and you carry the cross down the aisle of the church.  I looked online and it is very hard to find a script with good explanation.

Now we do have a Living Stations script in our members section that is ready to go and will be developed more and more as I use it, but this will help you learn how to start from scratch or tweak the content you did find.  I will start with what I did.

1) Set up the structure

The congregation will appreciate a structure.  After the first two stations they should have a good idea of what is expected of them.  It will also make it more comfortable for them to delve in to what is happening.  Our basic structure that we used is scripture, a voice (prayer by us), and Jesus’ response.  So just about every station includes that.

2) Scripture

I knew I wanted our script to be enriched with scripture.  So I went to the Vatican website and found what they used that year for scripture.  If you dig deep, you will find that each year they switch it up a bit.  So you can go back and look at what they have used for several years and use that.  You earn some brownie points when you join in prayer with the Vatican anyways!  Or just grab your stations of the cross pamphlets that you use in church and see what they use for scripture.

2) Meditations

For the meditations in our living stations script I used writings from my favorite saint, St. Alphonsus Liguori.  There is already a stations of the cross manual that came from his meditations so that made it easy.  These were what I used for the voice of the person.    I changes a few of the words to make it more youth friendly, but did not want to take away from the richness of his writings.

3) Jesus’ Response

It was important for me to have a part in the script where the youth would hear some things that may have been going through Christ’s head.  I wrote my own words for Jesus (bold I know).  They were very simple and spoke entirely of love.  Our main audience is the youth and I just wanted the youth to know that Christ loved them, so much they might get sick of hearing it.  I had three priests look it over and went with it.

4) Music

I was a music major in college and also do worship often for youth events so I knew what I wanted for music.  If you want suggestions here are a few songs that I use:

Love Song – Third Day
Via Dolorosa – Sandi Patty
Were You There

We also use the short worship song “Come Into My Heart” in between each station.  There are several different verses of it.

I would just recommend using a good mix of music that they know, that they can meditate on, and that truly brings out the meaning of lent.

5) Costumes

To be blunt, I do not know much about costumes.  When I arrived, a lady had already made the costumes and they were amazing, so we have used those every year.  I would recommend leaving this to a pro.  There are not too many ladies who know how to sew that wouldn’t do this for the parish if the materials were paid for.

So that is how I wrote up our script.  There are so many ways that it can be done.  If you need a quick fix, I have seen someone just do the regular pamphlet for a script.  Then they would have stills of a scene for people to look at.  They used a spotlight.  Turned off the spotlight during the transition song and then the next scene was up when they announced the station.

Have other ideas?  Please comment below and let us know what you do.

This is a popular ‘just for fun’ skit.  You need anywhere from 6-10 people, depending on how much time you have.

In a nutshell it is a skit where there is one line of seats at the movies and a couple arrives a little late in to the movie and there are only two seats available, one at each end of the row.  So the skit is about the couple trying to communicate during the movie.  The order you set people up and how you develop the characters is essential to making this skit hilarious.

A Basic order for the chairs that work out well is.

Seat 1 – Guy (nice guy, in love with girl)
Seat 2 – Old Lady (married to old Man, pretty normal, but talks like an old lady)
Seat 3 – Old Man (married to old Lady, very hard of hearing, find the things his wife does very cute)
Seat 4 – Geek (irritated by old man, very scared of Jock)
Seat 5 – Tough Jock (very mean, impatient, attracted to girl)
Seat 6 – Girl (normal girl, in love with guy)

So, starting with Seat 2, have the old couple come in and start watching the movie, then the geek, then the jock.  Use this time at the beginning and while each person finds their seat to start bringing out some of the characteristics of each person.  They can meet each other and talk a bit.  Once the movie starts than have the couple come out.  They can ask the jock to scoot down and he says no.  So they politely sit separately.

After everyone is seated the main theme is that the guy tries to communicate and send things to his girlfriend.  The theme is to draw out the awkward situations that it brings up.  Everything that is passed down is passed one person at a time.

You can do whatever you want but here is what we typically do.

First – Guy asks how the girl is doing, she sends back ‘fine’
Second – Guy asks if she wants food, she sends back ‘fine’
Third – Guy sends down popcorn or food and it is eaten by the others before she gets it
Fourth – Do the same for a drink
Fifth – The guys puts his arm around the old Lady and asks her to pass it down.
Sixth – The guys sends down a kiss.

How we typically end it is when the girl is kissed by the jock, she slaps him and walks out.  Then that gets passed all the way down and people get up and walk out each time, leaving the guy alone.  The guy can shrug his shoulders and walk out too.

A great skit for any youth ministry.

Please comment below with any other ideas or ways you have done this skit!

This is probably my favorite ‘anytime’ skit there is.

You need about 4-5 people to be the caterpillar, one person to be the owner of the caterpillar, and a volunteer. You will also need a glass of water.

To make a caterpillar have the 4-5 people stand behind each other, put their heads down, and put a blanket over all of them so you can only see from their knees down.  Have them practice walking around a little bit.

The skit is like a talent show or circus where the owner is showing off the many tricks that the caterpillar can do.   To start off since the caterpillar will need to warm up a bit, the owner can say how sometimes the caterpillar gets a little nervous when doing his tricks.

So have the caterpillar do the tricks like walk forward, walk backward, raise all of it’s right feet, left feet, etc.  You can do several tricks and make some up as you go.

For the final trick the caterpillar is going to jump over one of the volunteers from the audience.  So get a volunteer (someone you know will not mind getting wet) and have them lay on the floor.  The owner will let the audience know that this is the hardest trick for the caterpillar and remind them that he does get nervous and that he hasn’t done this trick too many times.

When the caterpillar walks over the volunteer, someone under the blanket (towards the back) has been holding the glass of water the whole time.  They spill the water all over the volunteer making it look like the caterpillar went to bathroom all over them.

That’s it!

This is a way of showing youth the difference of how a Christian acts compared to how people act when Christ is not involved in their decisions.

Each group will do a skit that has two endings based on a theme that you give them. The first ending will be the ‘Non-Christian’ way. They will then enter the CHRIST-LIKE ZONE and do the same skit with a more Christian-like ending.

Pump them up by teaching them the Twilight Zone song and have the group leader say ‘CUT’ after the first ending and then say ‘AND NOW ENTERING THE CHRIST-LIKE ZONE’ having everyone do the Twilight Zone theme.