The Small Church Ministry Podcast
The only podcast for volunteers in small churches and those who lead them, this show is about embracing small church ministry for what it should be - a unique place where God is already at work. Founder of Small Church Ministry, Laurie Acker, shares why large church strategies don’t work in small churches and how to get moving on what does. Each episode dives into creative solutions to small church struggles with a mix of inspiration, leadership skills, and actionable next steps to make an impact. Here’s to healthy small church ministry where you have all the volunteers you need to do exactly what God has in mind! Small church ministry isn’t less - but it is different. Small Church Ministry, the World's #1 Resource for Small Churches, includes a top-rated website, a Facebook community spanning 6 continents, free quarterly online conferences, and a small church ministry certification program.
The Small Church Ministry Podcast
144: Actually Fun (& Meaningful) Games For Smaller Teen Classes & Youth Groups | with Zach Hartman
Even the best curriculum falls short when you can’t get your teens and preteens engaged from the get-go. If your teens are less than enthused to be in class or you’re looking to up-level your youth ministry, this episode is for you.
Today’s guest is making it easy to plan and prep for your next event with games that draw kids in. Meet Zach Hartman, youth ministry leader and founder of ActuallyFun.com.
Join the conversation about why games aren’t just fun but are an ideal tool to build the connection needed to go deeper in discipleship. We’ll show you how to find the perfect games for your group size and age range.
Zach says, "Most games you find are either the same few activities that have been done to death, or even worse, they just aren’t fun. As a result, it takes hours of your time to either plan games from scratch or to find the few hidden treasures."
Let us save you time and money with easy-to-find games, tested by real kids, to help you go deeper in relationships and teaching too.
Connect with Zach Hartman:
www.actuallyfun.com
FREE Game Index: www.actuallyfun.com/game-index/
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Hey, this is Laurie Acker, welcome to the small church ministry podcast. Hey, welcome back to another episode of the small church ministry podcast. You know, as we talk small churches. I think one of the unique things about small churches versus big churches is a lot of us wear a lot of hats. We've got a mom who works in women's ministry who also teaches the youth group, or we've got the best grandpa on the world who, like serves in the nursery when he's needed, and then we'll jump into the junior high group to lead games, and it's just really fun to be picking up skills in so many different areas. And so today we're actually talking about games, specifically games for teen and youth groups. Also, I just want to say this, the stuff that we're going to talk about today also applies honestly to youngers. And I'm also going to venture to say some of the tips you're going to hear from our guests also will branch into those youth, those women's ministry mixers and games that we do on retreats and so many things, because a lot of the principles that we learn in leadership in so many ways cross into tons of different areas. But today, we're going to be hyper focused and zoom in with our guest today, Zach Hartman, who's going to be talking about actually fun and meaningful. So let's throw that in there. Can it be fun and meaningful at the same time? Games for smaller teen classes and youth groups? So Zach, before we dive in, do you want to just give a little background about yourself, how you ended up coming up with this? I know you have your own website. You've done youth ministry, your dad's been involved. Tell everybody a little bit about you absolutely. Lori, first
Zach Hartman:of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. I absolutely love what you said as well about how this is going to apply to a lot of different people. Because, you know, at the end of the day, all successful ministry is relational style. Ministry, right? We're always looking for opportunities to build stronger relationships between people, and that applies whether you're working with middle school down to elementary women's ministry, really, it covers it all. So I'm excited to get to talk to you. So you know, I actually have a pretty unique background. I graduated with a degree in civil engineering that I used for promptly eight months before I stopped working in the engineering field to pursue a full time career as a YouTuber. And so I have a chair that has 190,000 subscribers, and I did that as my full time job for a while, and that was a lot of fun. I made videos about video games, and learned a whole lot about that process. And I was really, really blessed to be in that position. And after about a year of working as a full time YouTuber, I kind of had this feeling, hey, you know, I think I need to get back into youth ministry. I had had a youth ministry job when I was in college, when I was living in Pennsylvania, after I graduated, I moved to Maryland, and I sort of didn't have a church to be a youth minister at. So I was like, You know what? I'm gonna I'm gonna try to look out for a church. And I was connected with a church that was looking for a youth pastor. It was really God doing some awesome work there. They said I was an answered prayer, and they were an answered prayer for me as me as well. And so I've been doing youth ministry at this church now, specifically for this is going into our third year, and it's amazing to see the difference in the relationships that we have in that group already. And like I mentioned when I was in college, I was actually with a smaller church, actually a collection of churches. So this is a collection of eight different churches that all wanted to provide a youth ministry program for their young people, but each individual church didn't really have enough to have a proper youth group, and so they kind of came together, pulled their resources. We bounced from church to church, and that was called the Harrisburg area Youth Initiative, and so I got to do that for two years as well. That was in the middle of covid as well, unfortunately, but still had a lot of great experiences with that group, and got to see them grow as well.
Laurie Acker:Okay, so, because we are talking to people in smaller churches, which is a huge range, by the way, you know, from upwards of 200 and even more and downwards, of like, you know, family style churches that have, like, meet in homes and have 12 to 20 people total, give us your range, Zach of what size youth or children's like any activity, a youth group, an event like, what's the smallest number of students you've had shown up, like in your in your life? And what's the biggest number,
Zach Hartman:sure, the smallest number I've ever had, I think I had two. It was a brother and sister, and they showed up to a meeting. They actually had another sister who normally came to the meetings, but she was sick, and so we had it was, it was me and them and their mom stuck around. And the most I ever had as a youth leader is probably about 25 at the church that I'm with currently. When I was in youth group, I was actually a part of a youth group that was pretty big, and I think we probably had upwards of 50 for some meetings. So I really gotten to be able to see sort of the full spectrum, and get to see what it looks like, you know, I think it's, I've taken the word straight off of your website, actually, you know, small church ministry definitely is not lesser, but it is different, right? And so how do we, depending on what size. Numbers wise, we have, how do we most effectively minister to that group? Is sort of an important question to ask.
Laurie Acker:Yeah, I love it. And also I love that you said two kids and they were siblings, because that is a different dynamic. And even when you mentioned small church, ministry isn't less, it's different. Sometimes I want to say it's not less, but it's more difficult, because a lot of people feel like you're moving up in the world when you have more and more and more people, but I just want to say I believe it's more challenging and it takes more skill, more attention and more intentionality when you do have less people in the room, less people to get their attention, because I think it's really easy to lead games for 30 kids. I think it is a skill set to lead games for three and so I love that you kind of talked about you've got the gamut, so now our audience just so, you know, they just fell in love with you because you said you've been in groups with two kids. Because this is a lot of our classes, a lot of our youth groups, a lot of our Sunday school events, a lot of our midweek events, we can have two, or we can have 10. And I think another dynamic that happens in small churches a lot is we don't know how many we're gonna get. When I worked in a larger church, you could count on a certain pool we'd have 20 to 30 kids at this kind of thing, or more whatever. But in a small church, if one family is gone. You just went from having 12 to having three, or having three to having one and things like that. So tell us about games. I know you're going to tell us how to make this work with smaller, smaller groups. And you know you're going to show us your website and or tell us about it and how to access these amazing games for free that you have there. But first off, before we get into all that. Why do you think games are important? Because some people don't think they are.
Zach Hartman:Yeah, you know, I have always been a huge fan of games. From the time I was a kid to, you know, now into my adult life, I have always just been a person that loves games and they're fun, but like you said, they serve a deeper purpose as well. So when we talk about building relationships with people, I kind of like to think of it as taking place over two steps, right? The very first step that you have to do is to build bridges between people. Very first thing you've met someone, they're an absolute stranger. You got to start building those connections. You got to start looking for points of commonality. You have to start building shared experiences, right? And as you continue to develop that relationship, and you build more and more of those bridges, only after you've gotten to a certain point can you get to the point of trying to tear down walls, right? We live in a world where, for better or for worse, we put up a lot of walls, right? And we try to wall ourself off. We try to sort of retreat away from who we want to be out of fear of being shot down or being made fun of, right? Especially when you're at that younger age range. I mean, oh my gosh. We all know what Middle School is like, right? And so trying to be able to build an environment where people can be their authentic self is you cannot overstate how powerful of an experience that is for a lot of these people. And you know, you're actually probably not even going to get to know for a lot of these people, how much of an impact you have in their lives, but rest assured, you you're having a tremendous impact in their life. So bringing it back to games, at least games really serve as a great experience to help build those bridges, especially even if it's just a stupid runaround game where you're just being crazy and hitting each other with dodgeballs and pool noodles, that still contributes greatly to building shared experiences having laughter, right? But then what's really interesting is that there's a lot of games out there that you can then use to teach a deeper lesson, and that's where the magic really starts happening, right? Because experienced based learning sticks with people significantly more than sitting down with them and just talking to them for an hour. Especially I look at some of my sixth graders, you know, they just want to run and run and play forever. And so it can be hard a year, two years down the road, to look back on an experience and say, Oh, what did we talk about? You know, what questions were we asking when we asking when we were having that conversation? But you can look back and you can say, Oh, I remember when we played that one game, when we played pan bang, where I shoved Jacob out of the group, and I felt so good in the moment, you know? And then we talked about how, hey, our group's not going to be the kind of place where we shove each other away, right? So you can use those games as a teaching tool, and not only is it more memorable, it just gets people out in the first place too. It's one of the biggest challenges that we face, is just keeping youth group at a place that's going to be as fun as it is, right? You're competing with so many different things, like sports and school, you really have to build something powerful to be able to convince people to come out in the first place. So those games really do a great job at convincing people. At convincing people to come out, but then using them to help teach your lesson is what keeps people there and really builds those meaningful connections. There's
Laurie Acker:so many, so many directions I can go with everything you just said I was taking all these mad notes, but one thing I want to bring up is like you talk about, like walls and defenses. And I to me from my experience, anytime a human being walks into a new room, there is an automatic defense, like even when people come to worship on Sunday mornings, I would talk about that with worship leading, you can't just start deep and heavy in theology, because people are coming in with a day with thoughts, with negativity, with hurt relationships and things like that. And I think that's the same thing like in youth group, when we bring kids in and say, Okay, have a seat. Well, this is human. This is a human thing, right? We need something to kind of break it up and get us into a new environment. But I also want to mention which you almost went there with that story you you shared. Games can backfire sometimes. You know, when kids who aren't picked aren't picked again, when kids feel a little bullied, when they feel left out, when they feel not able to be as good, when it turns competitive, and you know all of that, have you seen like, what disasters can we avoid before we get into how to do it? Well, what disasters would you kind of say, Yeah, this is, this is where games go bad. Because I do know, as an adult, some when I've had teams of people who've come in to teach Sunday school or youth group, they are anti games because of their experience they had as children, right? So they come in, they're like, I'm not doing games. I don't believe in games. I don't I don't like games. And a lot of times it's those negative experiences that built that, right? So what do you think about what I just shared? Yeah,
Zach Hartman:sure. Well, this extends even beyond just games in general, right? I think a really important part of leading any sort of group is establishing upfront what your group is going to be about, right? And you can do this for the very first meeting you've ever had together, or the first meeting of the school year, or halfway through, right? We actually just had our first meeting of the school year, and we went over this exact same stuff again, right? When you first establish with your group that this is not going to be like school. This is not going to be like the places that you're used to, right? This is going to be a place where we can rely on each other, and where we look for opportunities to build each other up. I always love using the word to sanctify right, to set something apart as different. When you establish that up front, that puts people in a different mindset, and that carries over into the conversations that you have, the games that you play, and into how people treat each other right. And so that helps iron out a lot of those kind of situations where, you know, when you're playing games, if you're getting competitive, especially if you have a competitive group, you know, things get heated. But if you've established that up front, that really does go a long way to sort of alleviate a lot of those problems before they even pop up. And then I think the other thing is just picking the right games. Right? You don't want to pick games that are going to pit people against each other in a way that's going to get nasty, right? You want to look for games that are fun, where, sure, maybe you're competing against another team, but it's more about your team working together, right? I also looked for different games that we'll play that are the whole group working together. There's one that, and this is a little infuriating to play, because I've played it as a youth, but it's called the helium hula hoop. And so you have everyone in your group stand around a hula hoop, and they put one pointer finger out, they point, and then the hula hoop rests on everyone's pointer finger, so everyone's got one finger on the hula hoop, and you just have to raise it from the ground up to waist level. But no one can take their finger off of the hula hoop. And inevitably, what ends up happening is someone raises their finger too quickly, and then it comes off of someone else's finger, and it's, it's this whole crazy game of, you know, how do we work together to make sure that we can accomplish this common task? And so being able to navigate sort of the conflict that comes up during that can also be a really powerful teaching moment. There's, there are sometimes where we'll have an activity that maybe intentionally so is a little bit of that conflict in there, but then the conversation that we have afterwards is, Hey, how did this, how do we feel about this? Right? How did that experience make you feel? Or, how did it feel to be the person that got called out as maybe, oh, you got to stop taking your finger off, because the truth is, we're all fallible, right? We all make mistakes. We have to have grace with each other, and so being able to use those moments, even even the moments that are a little hectic and maybe have a little bit of that conflict, being able to use those to talk about, what does it mean to live in healthy relationship with each other, you can spin it in that way as well.
Laurie Acker:I am just so excited to learn from you. I know you're working on some guest posts for the website as well, and this is not going to be the only time we talk, you guys, if you're listening, I've already got Zach on the hook for the next Kidman and youth conference coming up at the end of April, so this will not be the only time you hear from him, but if you are in a place where you can grab, like a notepad, piece of paper to jot some things down, like you're going to want that, because Zach's going to give us some good tips on how to lead games well. I know that a lot of volunteers, a lot of leaders are First off, intimidated by games. We may have had negative experiences. You know, we've got three kids. Zach's going to give us tips on how to just do games well. And you. And tell us where to find games that are actually fun and meaningful. So go ahead, Zach, give us some of your favorite pointers. That's
Zach Hartman:right. Well, you know, the whole reason that I started with my company is called actually fun, just like you mentioned. The whole reason I started with that was when I became a youth director, I found very little resources online for games that were actually fun to play, right? They're out there, but sometimes you gotta search really deep, or the ones that do come up are the ones that your youth have done a million times over and over again, right? And so I sort of had a backlog of games that I knew from being in youth group. I was in youth group for seven years, and honestly helped through my college years with my dad's youth group. My dad has been a youth director for 40 years now, and so he has seen it all. He's seen the change of what youth ministry looked like in maybe the 80s and 90s all the way to the present day. And I've also taken a lot of time searching online for those hidden gems that exist out there, right? And so what I tried to do, you know, we talked about the importance of playing the right games, and I tried to take a lot of those games that I found from my own experience, from my dad's catalog, from online, and compiled really well made tutorials for those games. So I use my background as a full time YouTuber. I've got a lot of video editing experience, and I put together a bunch of very succinct tutorials of here's what this game is, here's how you play it and and that's it. It's just it's real, real quick, right? So I've got a YouTube channel called actually fun Youth Games, where we've got dozens of game tutorials that are made to make it as easy as possible for you. To get the idea, figure out what you need to lead it. Give you any tips, any sort of resources that you might need for it. If there's something that you know, you print out that goes print out that goes along with it, anything along those lines, that's all right there really easily for you, and then you can run it with your group. And sort of, as we realized also then, as we built more and more of these tutorials, we had such a big backlog that we thought it would be an easy or we thought it would be a helpful resource to find an opportunity to organize those games. And so our website, actuallyfund.com has a page on it called the game index. And so you can go to that game index, and there's a bunch of buttons on the side that let you filter all of the game tutorials we've made by different criteria, such as what age group you're working with, whether you're playing indoors or outdoors, what materials you need, and specifically for small church ministries your group size as well. And so there's just a whole catalog of games that we're always continuously adding to. And so I think that that's sort of the first direction that I point a lot of the youth directors that we talk to, because, like you said, a lot of people want to play those games, or maybe they just don't know where to get started. And so we've tried to build that out as sort of our first resource that was, that was kind of the first project that we tackled.
Laurie Acker:Okay, so the number one tip is choose the right game, which I have to say, is so true. One of the things on your website said that many games you find are either the same few activities that have been done to death. Amen, even in women's ministry, we just had a post like that in the group was like, Okay, do we have anything new out there, right? So we've already done these games to death, and then you also mentioned just aren't fun. It's like the worst thing to call kids and say, Hey, we're gonna do this game, and then it just is not fun. So first tip is finding the right games. And I just have to just give a shout out for your website, like I was just in the game index, and you can say minimum players one, maximum player two. Like you can literally give a range like, you've got a really small thing, and several games are popping up right there that Zach has, like, time and tested for us, which I think is good. So once you got the right game, what makes a successful game leader? Because we've got introverts, we've got extroverts, we've got people who've led games. We've got people like you who are full of energy. Can a person who who doesn't have that much energy? Can they lead games? Well, can you give us some tips once we have the right game, what do we do to lead? Well,
Zach Hartman:yeah, absolutely. I think you know if you have, if you're working specifically with a wider age range, like I work with sixth grade through 12th grade, and everyone knows that someone who's fresh out of elementary school looks very different than someone who's looking at what college they're going to go to next year. And so as my group has, especially, I started with a lot of middle schoolers. Many of them have aged up into high school. Now I've been looking for more opportunities to find leadership roles for those high schoolers. So you get to a certain point where you're old enough, if you're trying in every game, you're just going to crush it, right? You're either going to crush all the middle schoolers, or, if it's a game where you're working together, you're just going to be able to come up with the answer very quickly. And so having conversations with some of those older students that you might have and saying, hey, you know, you're in a different position now, you know, you get it right. How can we find ways that you can help build them up, right? And talk to them about how you should step in when maybe someone's getting stuck, or maybe help them find the answer, but maybe not give it to them, right? And so I would say that's sort of an important dynamic to set up with your group. I also think just while we were talking about the game index, right, a lot of those. Games where you filter something like the max players as two. A lot of those games, that just means that it's ideal for people that have groups of two. But there's a lot of games that I have on that index that are maybe, you know, minimum player count is recommended at six or eight, but you can easily adapt those to be instead of, hey, it's this team versus this team. It's going to be a group challenge that we all try to compete together to solve.
Laurie Acker:Okay, so when have you seen games go disastrous? What do we not want to do when we're leading a game? Because you could have a really good game and lead it poorly. I've seen that happen.
Zach Hartman:You know, I've been pretty blessed in my group. I don't know if I've ever seen a game go disastrous necessarily. There's certainly times where I think that a game is going to be very powerful, and then logistically, it just doesn't work out right? One key example was I had this awesome activity. It was going to be like a game of telephone, but you were going to speak through the cups and a string, right? You're going to be on far sides of our gym, and you had to pass the message along, and it was going to go didn't work. Didn't work at all. You literally couldn't hear the person through the cup, and it within 30 seconds. We knew it was going to not work out well, right? And so I think that a really easy way that you can hedge against that is over planning, right? If you think that you're going to have enough time to play two or maybe three games, have five or six ready if you don't use them, you've got two or three more for the next meeting that you can rely on then. And if you need them, then you've got them ready to go as well. Not only does that help you in the event that your game maybe doesn't work out, though, as well as you thought it was going to, it also helps you in specifically not knowing if you're going to have maybe one person or six people, right? I do think working with a smaller group, the hardest part is just logistically, not knowing how many people are going to be there. That first group that I worked with was a family of three, a family of two, and then one only child, right? And so if that family of three was gone, I'm down 50% and so what I'm going to plan and what games I'm going to play changes drastically. So I would just say, sort of over preparing sounds like extra work, but it really isn't, because if you don't use that material, you just push it back until the next meeting. So I think that's sort of how you can hedge against
Laurie Acker:that. Yeah, I love it. We've had one of our conferences, one of the speakers talked about having an emergency bin. She just always had, like, a just a bin of all the extra things that you might have to pull out some time. You know what I mean? It's almost like, you know that that little tote where, okay, I need another game, and everything you need is right there, right even for when you have, like, a substitute in class and stuff. So I love the tip on over preparing, over planning. I think it's so important. And I noticed on your game, on your website, the games, at least the ones I looked up, they're not, they don't have, like, a lot of complicated supplies. They seem very easy to pull together, and not a lot of over, like, not a lot of work to pull them together. I guess is, what I noticed is that true of most of the games on there.
Zach Hartman:I think so. I think there's sometimes that I will run a game with my group that works well, but it's just, you know, sort of comes from the mess of my mind and something that I created. And so the games that make it to the game index specifically are the ones that are more simple to run, right? We look for games that don't require a lot of materials. They're either games that require things that you can use a lot of times, like pool noodles or whatever it is, right? Or I'll spend, my number is always $30 max for a meeting, is what I'll try to spend, and I very rarely end up hitting that limit. But a lot of the times, you can get a lot of bang for your buck with a couple of a couple of materials, right? Materials like pool noodles, materials like dodgeballs, bandanas, I use all the time that helps you denote different teams. You can play different games about supposed to tutorial on a game where you have to steal bandanas out of people's pockets, right? Materials like painters tape, you can use that to paint or to tape off different sections of your floor, right? Cones, right? There's a lot of materials that go a long way without needing to spend a bunch of money for every single meeting. So once you sort of have that backlog of materials, it enables you to play a lot of games there as well.
Laurie Acker:I love it. I love your take on just bringing people together, building bridges, relational ministry. Do you have a word of encouragement for people listening right now who like prepare for their youth groups or their Sunday school classes, and then just one or two kids come because sometimes there's that we feel a little deflated, like, ah, we thought there'd be more. What would you say to these volunteers out there?
Zach Hartman:So I'll share a story, actually. So I went to a church camp when I was in youth group, and it was a week away, and it was a great time, right? And I had a counselor who was like in our cabin with us. He was about four years older than me at the time, and he said something that stuck with me forever. He at that point in my life, I was very young, I was very awkward, I was not good with the ladies, and I was kind of beating myself up over that, right? And he told me, you know. Nice guys finish last, but the nice guys finish best, right? And that always stuck with me. He always told me, you know, you have to treat the women in your life with respect. You have to treat the people in your life that you that are around you, that are important to you, well, right? And that always stuck with me. And he never knew how much that stuck with me, right? He just kind of said it in passing. He probably forgot about it the next day. Thankfully, 10 years later, I had the opportunity to go up to him and say, Hey, man, I'm older now. I'm married. You said this thing to me one time changed my life. And if you're lucky, you get to know about those times that you say something that sticks with someone for the rest of their life. A lot of times you don't, right, we often measure our success, or we're tempted to measure our success in the number of people that show up, but you have to measure your success in the impact that you have on the people that do show up. If you can have a meeting and all of your games go to go down the trash can, and nothing works out. But you say one thing that resonates with someone, it's a successful meeting. And so it's really easy for us to beat up on ourselves and to think that maybe we're not as successful as we'd like to be. But the truth is, you have no idea, right? You have no idea what's going to connect with somebody, and all you can do is show up for them and then try to give them that opportunity to grow in their faith.
Laurie Acker:I love it. I love it. Okay, well, we're almost out of time. I'm gonna like highlight some of the things that I heard from you as you went just through everything on how to lead games really, really well. And then, Zach, if you have some things to add at the end, please do but what a great conversation. How important it is to choose the right game to build up some of your older kids, to help a little bit and just be part of the leadership over planning, having more games on hand than you think that you need, remembering that the point of games is that it's the bridge builder. Like the games aren't the end in themselves, but it's like the bridge builder of relationships and even leading into lessons, if you have a game that's going bad, you don't need to recover, just go on to the next game. Sometimes that's more important and to maybe under, like, Don't over complicate things. I loved your tip of building up a stash of materials, like bandanas, pool noodles, painters, tape, cones, things that work and and really can go a really long way, especially in our small churches, when our budgets are small. Anything else I missed that you want to throw into the end here? Yeah,
Zach Hartman:absolutely. Well, I mean, we've been talking like about this game index for the entire time here. That is a totally free resource that we're just going to continue to add to. We also do have some other resources, just a shameless plug for actually fun that we've built up. We've got a couple of different things that are meant to build relationships between people, right? I mentioned how my dad was in youth ministry for 40 years, and he actually pursued back in the 90s as a path very similar to what I'm doing now, right? Where he was looking for different sort of resources that he could develop to send out to youth directors. And one of those resources I actually took and updated for the modern day. So it's called the comfy chair. It's a deck of 100 cards that have group building questions on them that range from really surface level questions, like, what's your favorite movie, to questions that are deeper, like, What's the hardest thing you've had to go through? Right? And what's really interesting about that game is that it gives people the opportunity to decide where they are in that process of building bridges and tearing down walls, if you're newer, you might go for something that's on the easier side. If you've known each other for a long time, you'll go for something deep, right? And so whether your group's known each other for 10 minutes or for 10 years, it really does a lot to build those bridges and tear down walls. So that's just an example of something that we have. We have something called worth 1000 words, which is another sort of idea of being able to use a picture to answer a meaningful question, instead of having to just, you know, free freestyle it. We've got fun big activities, like we've got jumbo letter tiles. They're like big scrabble tiles that allow you to play dozens of super sized games. Some of them are just for fun and crazy. Some of them are also meaningful as well. We've got digital products, and then we also have, you know, we've talked about that experience based learning and sort of that next level in youth ministry comes from our membership program called actually fun Pro, which is it delivers two game driven lessons to you every month. So not only does it have specifically, hey, here's the lesson that we're going to teach, here's all the guiding questions and everything that you need for that, but then it also has a game that ties into that lesson, like we had talked about earlier, right? That experience based learning resonates so much more with people. It gets people out to your meetings. That really is sort of the secret sauce. And so we've done everything that we can to just make that as easy as possible for you, something that would normally take me four or five, six hours to plan you'll just have at your fingertips and ready to go. And so that's, I think a very, very good value. We try to keep it the price as low as we can for that. And there's even more membership benefits that are going to be coming in the next couple of months as well. So that's my shameless plug for what actually fun offers. Again, if you just want to use the game index, that's all right as well. But I really think some of the best stuff that we have to offer are those products and in that membership as well. Yeah.
Laurie Acker:So good. Well, Zach. I wouldn't have brought you on if I didn't think what you had was valuable. So definitely everybody listening. You're going to want to check out actuallyfund.com and Zach, I know you haven't been to a lot of women's retreats or women's events, but if there's any women listening right now, I'm telling you that game index is gold, even for the mixers and the activities when you're trying to break down those walls. So Zach, thank you so much for being with us. We're going to put the link in the show notes. We want people to go check out actually fun.com and again, the number one tip that Zach gave, which I agree with and I did youth ministry, children's ministry for a couple decades, choosing the right game. It's It's gold. So check out that game index on ashleyfun.com and Zach, thank you for being with us today. So fun to have you here and get to know you and introduce you to our audience. So good. All right, everybody until next week. Be a light you.