Tag Archives: Austin
Christmas Eve at Gateway
Posted on 05. Dec, 2010 by Kenny.
I’m pretty excited about Christmas at Gateway this year. For a church, we’re doing something a little different than we’ve done before. Austin is a pretty unique town as in a significant portion of the town are singles, which mean lots of people going home for Christmas. Although we’ve done four or five Christmas Eve services in the past, I’d never describe our attendance as “stagering.” I think the five services provided convenient times for everyone to come and most people who came seemed to be those who call Gateway home.
This year is totally different. This year the Christmas Eve services are very community focused with a target to connect with families. It’s a whimsical production that the whole family is going to love including dance, music, people flying through the air and even a little bit of comedy.… Read the rest
Continue Reading
Last day to register for Illuminate!
Posted on 01. Nov, 2010 by Kenny.
So, I’ve been talking about the Illuminate my team and I are hosting at Gateway Church here in Austin, Texas. We’re only 5 days away and today is the very last day to register. I can’t tell you how excited I am. It didn’t help that a lot of things didn’t come together until late for the conference this year, but I’ve felt a wide variety of emotions putting this all together. I’ve been excited about the dream, worried that we didn’t get the word out fast enough, nervous that we were going to lose a lot of money and a little apprehensive that we’re not forgetting something really important. Ha!
Well, right now I’m totally stoked. I’m a goal setter and I get stoked when we hit goals.… Read the rest
Continue Reading
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!… Read the rest
Continue Reading
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.… Read the rest
Continue Reading
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.… Read the rest
Continue Reading
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.… Read the rest
Continue Reading
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.… Read the rest
Continue Reading
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:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]… Read the rest
Continue Reading
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.… Read the rest
Continue Reading
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.… Read the rest
Continue Reading
