Tag Archives: Austin
Need a job?
Posted on 07. Oct, 2010 by Kenny.
Are you looking for a ministry job? Have you been hoping to make a transition to something different? Sensing that the Holy Spirit is saying that your time is up where you are currently? Well, here are two possible options.
Some friends of mine in ministry recently told me about openings they have on their teams. The first job is as a director of Elementary Ministry at Austin Ridge Bible Church. My friend John Sorrell is the Children’s Pastor and I think it would be a real treat to work on his team. They’ve got a great facility and a quickly growing church in one of the coolest parts of Austin, TX. Let me tell you, this could be a GREAT opportunity for you! So, if you’re interested, check out the job posting here. Make haste, this position has been “out there” for several weeks!
The other posting is for an Elementary Ministry Coordinator in Northern California. I won’t share my personal opinion about California (lots of fruits and nuts)… oops, I just did. However, I’ve been to Northern California and I simply could not imagine actually living is such a place. I’ve spent a little time with Christiaan VandenHeuvel and he’s AMAZING! Definitely check out this incredible opportunity.
Feel free to ask me questions, but I don’t know much. Just do what the links tell you to do.
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Leadership Weekend Review
Posted on 31. Aug, 2010 by Kenny.
This weekend was Gateway’s annual Leadership Weekend. Every year it’s a Friday night and most of the day Saturday event where the core of the church comes to worship together, pray, be challenged and hear the vision for the upcoming year and engage in how God is leading us. This was my third such event at Gateway, and it was absolutely phenomenal. This year we laid out some pretty major challenges for the leaders of Gateway. The staff has been in an organizational restructuring for the last 6 months and the full plan of why we restructured and what the new structure is setting us up to do was revealed. It was met with excitement and zeal. The energy surrounding this weekend was absolutely contagious.
What’s really exciting is to see all the progress. I remember sitting in an off site meeting with our directional team a little over a year ago as we got stuck while talking through some issues. It was during this frustrating meeting where some ideas were brought up for the first time that led to where we’re headed right now. I also remember sitting in another overnight off site last Fall when early ideas were presented to the group, ideas that might address problems we were facing as an organization. Many people have prayed, fasted, discussed and strategized for thousands of hours to come up with what was presented this weekend. I’m totally excited about where we are heading as a body and it was thrilling to see the buy in.
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Gateway Church: Let’SEXpress
Posted on 01. Sep, 2009 by Kenny.
Here at Gateway we just wrapped up a five week series on sex. I guess it’s kinda the series churches are trying to hit, huh? I haven’t really listened to any other church’s series on sex, so I can’t really compare. What I can say is that I’m incredibly impressed with Gateway’s presentation of this series. Since coming to Gateway, I feel like I’ve hit the “sex” issue head on more so than any other church I’ve been at. Maybe it’s the people here at Gateway or maybe it’s just that people are more willing to talk about it here as compared to other places I’ve been. I’m in constant conversations with volunteers who are dealing with sexual relationships in their lives. I’m also counseling many couples for marriage who have been sexually active that have committed to abstinence until they are married. There’s nothing like meeting someone for the first or second time and then diving directly into really personal stuff like this. So, these issues are big deals here at Gateway, so this series provides a wealth of information for our church as well as resources for our leaders. Here are the messages.
GodSex
This message explored God’s design for sex.
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MarriedSex
This message explored sex within the marriage. Click here for a video illustration that went with this message.
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SingleSex
This message explored how singles need to deal with sex. Click here for a powerful video about two singles dealing with their relationship.
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UnfaithfulSex
This message explored unfaithful sex, specifically where the roots set in that lead to unfaithfulness. Click here to read a letter from a former porn star who describes what the porn industry is really like.
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SameSex
This message explored homosexual sex. Click here to view the video of this message.
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I love my church!
Posted on 31. Aug, 2009 by Kenny.
I’m more proud of my church today than ever before. I’m thrilled an honored to work in this faith community, a church that’s being raised up out of the culture. Yesterday we covered a risky topic for churches but a topic that is important to our church and community. The message was about same sex relationship. Rather than hear John speak about it for 40 minutes, which he would do very well, he spoke for about 20 minutes and gave the rest of the service over to three people in our church to tell their story. All three are people who attend Gateway that have recently come out of homosexual relationships. Their stories are stories of grace and life-change. They’re not stories of miraculous conversions where God healed them and took something away, but stories of Christian men and women who have struggled with their sexuality and made decisions to honor God with their bodies. I’m not going to say anymore as I just can’t do this any justice.
Click here to watch the video.
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I <3 Austin
Posted on 12. Jul, 2009 by Kenny.
Why do I love this place so much?
Good food? Yes
Good music? Yes
Beautiful surroundings? Yes
There are a lot of things I love about this town, but today I say so for one reason.
1 out of every 3 people is a computer genius. Okay, maybe that’s a little extreme but just about everyone I meet is in the technology industry.
This morning one of our check-in computers was down. When logging into Fellowship One, it was trying to look for updates but never launched check in. Not a huge deal, but it was one of the frontward facing computers that gets a lot of traffic. A husband of one of our volunteers saw that the computer was down so he asked if he could take a look at it. In about 5 minutes he figured out exactly what was happening, something that Fellowship One would have to fix to create a work around. I asked him, “do you want to talk to tech support?”
“Sure!”
Five minutes later the two of them figured out the problem and fixed it. The computer was ready for our 11:00 service. If he hadn’t stepped in, we would have been down a computer all day.
I love me some computer nerds!
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Gateway story
Posted on 02. Jul, 2009 by Kenny.
Yesterday I included two clips of our One Prayer message from last Sunday, “God is working.” Near the end of this message John shared a testimony from the early days of Gateway. I remember reading about this in John’s book, “No Perfect People Allowed.” It was stories like this that made me want to be a part of this church so much. It’s a church reaching messy people and God is working in the lives of so many of them. I can’t ever see me working in a church that doesn’t embrace the culture like Gateway. Listen to this story:
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Gateway’s next campus
Posted on 17. May, 2009 by Kenny.
So, Gateway Church has been Multi-site for about 17 months. Our South Campus continues to grow steadily and we’re gaining more knowledge and experience in how this multi-site thing works for Gateway. Gateway is a church that was raised up out of the culture in Austin. The weird, eclectic, liberal and funky culture that is Austin. What Gateway is doing is working! Unfortunately, we’re limited in our current facilities. Multi-site is the only way to continue to reach this city.
We’re planning to launch one or two new campuses in 2010. This is very exciting. However, neither of these will be our next campus. We’re launching a new web campus by the end of 2009.
Our web campus will be a full experience. It’s not just about getting the video out on the web or getting a crowd in a virtual room experiencing it together. It’s all those things and community. Gateway was a church of small groups before it was a Sunday morning experience. It’s still a church of small groups. Now it will also be a virtual community as well.
To do this, Gateway hired a new Internet Campus Pastor (not sure if that is his specific title). He’s a pastor with a ton of tech and web know-how. So, he’s diving in head first to completely rebuild our current church website and then launch the web campus. Exciting!
As we venture into this whole web presence, it beckons me to ask, “Who do I do my job (Next Generation) in the online world?” For those of you with online campuses, what do you do for Kids and Students? Anything? Ideas?
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Something’s hapening in Austin
Posted on 14. May, 2009 by Kenny.
This excites me very much. Austin is a Texas exception to the rule. It’s a liberal town in the middle of the Bible belt. I recently saw that only 10-15% of the city attends a church. So, there is a lot of work to be done.
However, there are a handful of big churches in this town that have a lot of influence. So, at least this city does have a voice.
I remember reading a book about six years ago that changed everything for me. I was in a mainline denominational church where I was a little frustrated. I picked up the book “Beyond the Box” by Bill Easum. It talked about churches that were doing creative new things to reach their communities. The two chapters that excited me most was the chapter on multi-site ministry and the concept of “a church in a city.”
Two year later I would become a part of a multi-site church. It was very exciting to see this realized. It could be that this next year I could get an opportunity to experience this “a church in a city” concept. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me describe what’s happening.
Last week my pastor went off with about a dozen other pastors here in Austin for a 24 hour retreat. Their agenda? Pray. They Prayed for our city and how they collectively could reach the city for Christ. During this retreat, many of the pastors submitted to each other’s leadership, committing their churches to be less so that The Church could be more. So, somethings happening when churches start coming together to plan out how to reach a community. What would it look like if a community felt a tangible difference made by multiple churches working together? Churches are notorious for not working together. It’s a reason many people are turned off by church. This is “a church in a city.”
So, pray for Austin. Pray that The Church would be Jesus to a community that is far from God.
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Why Austin doesn’t believe
Posted on 24. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
Church strategy is interesting. Churches understand that Easter is a big Sunday for the church, but the series that follows Easter is crucial. The plan is to draw people back after Easter. The series we started last week is called “Why Austin doesn’t believe.”
Yes, technically we’re in the Bible belt and Texas is know for old fashion and conservative ideals. However, Austin is the exception to that rule. The rest of Texas like Austin for the music and the food, but think we can “have our liberal weirdos.” Ha! Yes, Austin is way different from any other place I’ve ever lived. So many people are FAR from God and many of them are open and searching. Gateway has created an incredible experience for people who are open and searching. About 1/3 of our weekend attendance classify themselves as non-Christians. They’re here becasue Gateway is a safe place to explore what faith means and wrestle with it until a person is ready to believe.
So, for the past few months we’ve had people send in reasons why they didn’t believe. We encouraged our church to ask their unbelieving neighbors, family and co-workers why they didn’t believe. From all of this information, this series was constructed – an opportunity to look at the evidence and see what happens. Every Sunday we’re holding an open forum for more questions. We also have a forum on our website where people can continue to ask questions and seek answers to the toughest questions. God’s not afriad of tough questions and we shouldn’t worry when people ask them. So, it will be exciting to see how people respond over the coming weeks. Here is the line-up of services.
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Easter Recap
Posted on 15. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
I broke my Sabbath rule this week. Yeah, I’m blaming it on Easter. Sara and I have been celebrating an actual 24 hour (at least) sabbath rest every weekend for the last 6 weeks or so. We had Saturday services this Easter, so I headed up to the church at noon to get ready.It was supposed to rain and we were supposed to take family Easter portraits, so I went up early enough to figure out exactly where we would take pictures I also went up early to finish setting up Fellowship One as I had to create new activities and schedules for Easter services.
At 5:00, we had a HUGE crowd, I wasn’t expecting the turnout. We had some lag issues with Fellowship One which caused a little bit of a backup in our check-in lines. However, we had great volunteer coverage and the service went great.
Our 6:30 service was much smaller for kids, but it too went off great.
We took family portraits after both of these services and the families seemed to really enjoy them.
I went home and crashed hard.
About 30 minutes before the 9:00 service began, it started raining… HARD!
I was having issues with three classrooms in Fellowship One and started to panic a little… then it worked itself out.
Attendance for the 9:00 service was light as we expected and this was the service I got to attend.
The sun came out in full glory for the 10:45 service and so did the people. It was pretty packed.
I wasn’t expecting this, but the 12:30 service as also HUGE. I was amazed. We offered family portraits after this service and everyone loved them. Oh, we also had more visitors at 12:30 than any other service.
After the services were over, I took the family to an Easter Egg hunt at a friends house. It was the perfect end to a great weekend!
Easter at Gateway was so much fun. We had over 1100 kids with almost 8,000 in total. In big church, they performed a Rock Opera which included music from U2 and Radiohead. It was an amazing service… powerful and emotional. I still can’t believe I work at a church like this!!!
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