Carrie Elderberry

Carrie Elderberry has been writing biblical puppet scripts for over 25 years — not because she set out to be a playwright, but because children needed stories, and puppets turned out to be the perfect way to tell them.

It started in a church setting in Redlands, California, where Carrie discovered that something remarkable happens when a puppet takes the stage. Children who wouldn't engage with a lesson would lean forward, ask questions, and carry the story home. Kids who struggled socially — and some who rarely spoke at all — would find their voice behind a curtain. That early experience shaped everything that followed: scripts designed not for performance, but for participation. No fourth wall. No passive audience. Just biblical truth, told in a way children remember.

Over the decades, Carrie's scripts have traveled far beyond that first church. They've been performed in Sunday schools, after-school programs, VBS weeks, backyard gatherings, and tent meetings. Middle schoolers have used them to lead younger kids. A team at Packinghouse Church has been performing them for years — some who started with Carrie as children themselves, now mentoring the next generation. Students from Arrowhead Christian Academy took the scripts to Guatemala on a foreign mission trip, performing for children and adults alike.

The plays are enjoyed by all ages. They have been successfully shared with adults in jail ministry and in outreach to the homeless — at a jail in upstate New York, where puppets aren't permitted, Carrie reads the scripts as Readers' Theater with incarcerated women, finding that the same stories that delight children can also bring the gospel to people who have rarely heard it spoken with such care.

The scripts on this site are Carrie's gift to the church — free to download, free to perform, free to adapt for whatever space and team you have. You don't need a stage. You don't need experience. You don't need to buy puppets. You need a story worth telling, and Carrie has written fifty-seven of them.