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My Work
Article 3
Pastor's mission: Bring puppets, people together
World work - The Joyful Noise Brigade takes kids on outreach to prisons, hospitals and overseas
Thursday, December 28, 2006
CORNELIA SEIGNEUR
The Oregonian
When Gary Strudler, children's pastor at Rolling Hills Community Church in Tualatin, went to Sudan recently to minister to Sunday school teachers, he took along 40 donated puppets and showed the teachers how to use them so they could do outreach to children in desert camps and use them in their local churches.
"Puppets are colorful and fun," he said, "and they cross international barriers."
Strudler should know. He created Joyful Noise Brigade, a music and puppet performance group comprising students from fifth grade through high school. For almost two decades, the group has ministered at locations including the Oregon State Penitentiary, retirement homes, migrant worker camps and local children's hospitals, as well as overseas in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya.
The appeal of puppets, Strudler said, is their innocence.
"They bring out the child within us," he said. "Puppets help people in prisons and nursing homes just let down, which makes them more open to healing truth."
Joyful Noise employs as many as 50 puppets in a show.
"For different songs we use different puppets," Strudler said. "It is hard to coordinate the kids; we divide and conquer and have other adults helping."
Ruth Howard, a home-schooled 10th-grader from Tualatin who has been involved with Joyful Noise since fifth grade, said maneuvering puppets is not child's play.
"First you learn how to use your hand in the puppet's mouth, and it's really hard because you have to keep your first four fingers down and move only your thumb. Then you have the puppet's head," Howard said. "The whole point is to make the puppets look lifelike."
She traveled with a Joyful Noise team to Uganda and Kenya last summer, as did Eric Barton, a 16-year-old from Lake Oswego who attends Westside Christian High School.
"The highlight of the Africa trip was ministering to kids," said Barton, who has been involved with Joyful Noise for seven years. "We took oversized canoes on a lake to this island and all the kids came rushing toward us."
Strudler, of Oregon City, started working with puppets as a child on Long Island, N.Y., where he put on shows for his friends.
"I invited kids over into our basement and charged a penny. I used hand puppets and did stories and songs," Strudler said. "I gave up doing puppet shows in junior high, when it wasn't cool anymore."
It became cool again when he was a deputy sheriff with Multnomah County, a job he began in 1978, two years after earning a bachelor's degree in criminal justice from Kent State University.
"I rode around working patrol with my big red Cookie Monster-type puppet named Ralph, and I would wave at people with the puppet and go into preschools and teach little lessons," said Strudler.
"I used puppets to teach about child abuse and drug and alcohol prevention in the schools," he said. In 1984, he won a Distinguished Service Award from the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office and an award for Outstanding Programming in Child Abuse Prevention from the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, now Prevent Child Abuse America.
That year, he struck out on his own as a crime prevention specialist, traveling around the state and country with his puppets.
In 1987, he began work at Rolling Hills -- and brought along his puppets.
Contact Cornelia Seigneur
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