Ephrata’s Ryan Bomgardner is a full-time comedian and ventriloquist and has been on stage professionally for two decades.

At age 10, Bomgardner started performing at local churches with his puppets before small audiences. Today, at 37, Bomgardner averages about 130 shows a year and has performed at Christian festivals before audiences of more than a thousand.

Bomgardner, an entrepreneur, also has built a niche travel business organizing and hosting cruise vacations for the Anabaptist and Plain sect communities. The program, like most other travel programs in 2020, stopped due to COVID-19, but it is back on track with two cruises on the books for this year and plans for 2023.

Bomgardner organized his first cruise for conservative Christians in 2012 at the urging of fellow performers he met while performing as a ventriloquist on the entertainment circuit and aboard cruise ships. It attracted some 400 travelers to the Caribbean with its Christian programming.

“Many of the first-time cruisers were ready to sign up for a second trip before they left the first,” he says.

Bomgardner partners with Royal Caribbean International on the trips, whose clientele may surprise those from English — or non-Amish — communities.

“I’m always amazed,” Bomgardner says, “when people show surprise in learning that the Mennonite and Amish families take vacations. Our cruises were new to many people but something they were willing to try rather than just heading back to the beach for a week in the summer. They enjoyed the change.”

Bomgardner calls his cruise program Sail and Sing. He organizes an itinerary with both on-board entertainment and destination tours. He invites well-known Christian entertainers and speakers — his personal friends — to perform, and many have done multiple trips with Sail and Sing.

The cruises now attract groups of more than 1,000 travelers and more to the Caribbean, Alaska and the Mediterranean.

A Sail and Sing cruise schedule includes Christian music concerts and hymn sings, religious chalk talks, devotional programs and religious speakers.

Although it is a vacation for everyone, Bomgardner feels Sail and Sing passengers all come back spiritually refreshed.

As a professional entertainer, Bomgardner works with a puppet-dummy partner, sometimes several, and the popular ventriloquist has traveled the world with them. His shows are appropriate for adults and children. This past summer, besides doing out-of-town shows, he performed regularly at the Bird-In-Hand Stage locally and will return for the 2022 summer season. Before he married wife Gail and they started a family, Bomgardner was a regular cruise line performer and saw no reason why cruises would not be attractive for the conservative Christian community.

The Steve Stutzman Family Singers have performed on all the Sail and Sing cruises. Stutzman is a Lancaster County native and performs nearly 100 times each year across the country with his family.

“If we have 700 Sail and Sing cruisers on a trip, just about everyone will attend the evening show with Christian entertainers, which Ryan hosts,” Stutzman says.

Stutzman says he and the other performers know many of the cruise travelers from previous trips or have met them at church performances.

“Some of them know the lyrics of the hymns as well as we do and join us in two or three-part harmony,” he said.

Although the early cruises focused on pure vacation locations, Bomgardner took a natural step forward — at the suggestion of his repeat travelers — in 2019 and scheduled a cruise with a religious focus. The trip was a 12-day Mediterranean cruise that followed the Journeys of the Apostle Paul with stops in Athens, Corinth, Malta and Sicily, where Paul preached the new Christian religion. Bomgardner is planning a Holy Land trip in 2023 including stops in Israel, Egypt and Jordan. He also has a Mediterranean Bible Study Cruise planned for five countries in 2023.

Bomgardner says he continues to partner with Royal Caribbean International, and they have welcomed his guests and provide him with the support to make the vacation unique for Christian travelers.

“We’re such a large group now,” Bomgardner says, “other passengers ask the crew about us and wonder if we’re on an Amish Spring Break. We actually hold one open performance each cruise where other passengers are welcome to join us to see what we’re about. We don’t hide the fact that we all have a strong Christian faith, regardless of what church or what tradition we come from.”

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