Tag Archives: Easter
Gateway Church: Easter – Your Great Story
Posted on 08. Apr, 2012 by Kenny.
I just have to write about why I love my church so much.
There’s something amazing when you get to be on staff at a church that you’d certainly attend if you weren’t ministry. I’m about to celebrate my 4th year at Gateway and I’m so proud to be at this church.
Two of Gateway’s core values is to be a church for those who are far from God and to place a high value stories. Both of those values were carried out at our Easter services this year.
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Good Friday resources: Where are they?
Posted on 03. Apr, 2012 by Kenny.
It seems that there really isn’t any shortage of Easter resources. From curriculum, video, and other needs, you can find just about anything you’re looking for. But that’s not true of Good Friday. It appears that most resources seem to lump all of Good Friday and Easter into one package, but the Good Friday stuff really can’t stand on it’s own. With more churches offering Good Friday services, events and experiences, the need for stuff specific to Good Friday has increased.
At Gateway we’re doing a very interesting and unique (unique to us) experience for Good Friday which I’ll write about later. We’re putting together a family experience around around Good Friday and we really had a difficult time finding what we were looking for. With what we did find, it was hard to find something that wasn’t too bloody and something that wasn’t too cheesy.
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Good Friday Reflections
Posted on 23. Apr, 2011 by Kenny.
So, last night I got the privilege of speaking to the 1st-5th graders at our Good Friday service. I actually used the Good Friday lesson of “God to the Rescue.” Great job Dan, Gina and Jonathan! It was a great lesson. I tweaked to make it my own as well as it being a stand-alone message, but it was a lot of fun to teach!
I realized something more this Good Friday than I ever had before. Probably because I’ve never “taught” a Good Friday service or anything, so I’ve probably not been as keenly aware of this before. My observation? Good Friday is the ugly stepchild of Easter. Before anyone takes offense at that statement, let me explain.… Read the rest
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Give-Away: God’s Kids Easter Resource
Posted on 12. Jan, 2011 by Kenny.
Yesterday I blogged about God’s Kids Worship’s “A Big Basket of Easter Songs.”
The kind people at God’s Kids Worship want to give one away… to you. Nice of them, huh? It’s a $29.98 value that you can have by simply retweeting the following message:
Win God’s Kids Worship: Easter Songs resource pack for your #kidmin and get cool & creative Easter ideas. Click here: http://goo.gl/ohZxv
Don’t spam twitter though, only tweet the message one time a day. Leave a comment below as well telling me the most creative thing you’ve done for your kids at Easter.
So, I’ll put your name in the “virtual” hat for every tweet you post (remember, only one per day) as well as one time for every comment you leave (you can post more than one comment, but it has to be a different Easter idea for it to count an additional time).… Read the rest
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Easter Portraits 2.0
Posted on 02. Apr, 2010 by Kenny.
Last year I wrote here about how we killed our Easter Egg hunt. Instead, we brought in volunteer photographers to take family portraits to lure people to specific services. It was the first year we’ve done anything like this and it was very successful. It was a rainy Easter weekend and we look forward to seeing how everything goes on a sunny Easter weekend.
What new and innovative things are you doing this Easter to both draw new families and lure regular attendees to less attended services?… Read the rest
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Huge Giveaway: What do you think?
Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by Kenny.
A local church (when I say local, I mean another church in Texas) is doing a creative outreach this Easter Sunday. Bay Area Fellowship of Corpus Christi is giving away millions this Easter Sunday. That’s right, millions. Bikes, guitars, TV’s, gift bags and cars. Yeah, I said cars. It’s part of their message this Sunday called the Ultimate Giveaway. Read more about it here.
God did give us a free gift in his son, Jesus. The gift of grace through this amazing sacrifice is the most valuable and priceless gift ever given and it’s worth getting excited about. Bay Area feels that giving away millions of dollars in gifts not only illustrates the example (obviously not to the same degree) of God’s divine giveaway, but also is a high profile lure to get people to come in and check out what’s going on at Bay Area Fellowship this Easter weekend.… Read the rest
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Easter Family Portraits
Posted on 16. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
Because we didn’t “officially” kill the Easter Egg Hunt until three weeks before Easter, I didn’t have that much time to put together the portrait thing. That’s okay since there wasn’t too much to do.
First, I contacted the photography team. We’ve got a dozen or so professional/semi-professional photographers at Gateway. Whenever we have events, they come out and snap pictures. It helps us have good coverage of an event and it helps them with exposure of their photography business. It took about a week, but I heard back from enough to have 3-5 photographers per service (we only did the portraits immediately following our three lesser attended services).
Second, I advertised the portraits. I didn’t say anything about not having a hunt or that this was replacing the hunt, we just said we’re offering free family portraits after these services to make room for our guests during the other service times.… Read the rest
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I killed our Egg Hunt!
Posted on 15. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
This year I killed our Ester Egg hunt.
I’m not going to take all the credit for it, my team really didn’t want to do it either. However, it was me who had to sit in the directional team meeting and say, “Oh, we’re not doing the Egg Hunt this year.” The expressions I got were priceless. Silence. Then someone said, “what do you mean we’re not doing an Egg Hunt?”
Let me scoot back a little. Gateway has done an Egg Hunt every Easter for at least five years, maybe more. I was here for my interview last year right after Easter. My Early Childhood Director spent several minutes telling me how things fell apart. It jus wasn’t well planned or well staffed.… Read the rest
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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.… Read the rest
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Easter Sign final proof
Posted on 10. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
Thanks for the feedback on the blog and twitter. Seems like everyone liked. Matt McKee helped me with some design tweeks and I feel it’s a better sign now. Thanks so much Matt! I’ll be taking this out to print in an hour or so. Feel free to critique more if you’d like… I could get it in time.
BTW, this was designed in Illustrator. I’ve been a Photoshop geek for nealry 10 years, but now I’m trying to learn to use Illustrator. I barely know what I’m doing, but I think I like it. Photoshop isn’t the best program for desiging signs or banners… I just needed to make the switch for my larger design jobs.… Read the rest
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