Tag Archives: Gateway
Good Friday family experience
Posted on 04. Apr, 2012 by Kenny.
I’m excited about what Gateway is offering families this year for Good Friday. We’ll have Easter services on Saturday and Sunday, but we’ll offer a unique experience on Friday. From 5-9, we’ll have several “choose-your-own-adventure” type experiences for people to choose from. We’ll have dramas, music, worship, short teachings, short films, audio experience of the cross, art installation and tactile experience (with a several crucification nails from the 1st century), a guided prayer experience and several other options. All these things are happening multiple times during the evening all in different venues. Due to the nature of Good Friday, many of the venues are not really child appropriate, so we are hosting a family experience in addition to childcare for kids under the age of 4.
The family experience will feature songs and a short film about Good Friday (I wrote about it here) which we’ve broken down into parts where we can expound on what was happening and guide families in discussion around the events of Good Friday.
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Talking leadership in Dallas-Fort Worth
Posted on 27. Jan, 2012 by Kenny.
Next Thursday I’m heading up to Dallas-Forth Worth for a day to connect with Children’s Pastors and leaders from several large ministries. I’m really excited to partner with Greg Baird and speak, lead some conversations and learn from others on the subject of leadership within the context of leading in large churches.
The brains behind Worlds of Wow have put together a unique event at Gateway Church in Southlake, TX and I’m pretty pumped. It’s not too often when you’re in a room with other leaders who all lead at the same capacity or greater than you. I’m humbled because although I’ll be sharing the stage with Greg, I feel there’s probably much I could learn from those in the room.… Read the rest
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Baptism Celebration
Posted on 18. May, 2011 by Kenny.
A few weeks I wrote about our upcoming Baptism Celebration. That Baptism Celebration is happening this Saturday. That’s one of the reasons you’ve not seen a lot of posts on this blog recently. Wow, I’ve been learning a LOT. Between now and next week, I hope to share a lot of what we learned. I’ve had some moments of failure as well as some moments of true excitement. I’ll share it all. However, I wanted to share a sneak peak. Here’s a video interview of one of the kids being baptized. I’ll show this just before each child is baptized on Sunday. BAM!
I’m so excited!… Read the rest
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Baptism Success
Posted on 18. Apr, 2011 by Kenny.
Yesterday we help baptisms at Gateway. The weather was perfect and so many people made decisions of faith and followed Jesus in Baptism. It was an amazing sight to see. However, it was a very different experience for kids. Don’t get me wrong, I love baptisms and love celebrating this day, but for the first time in three years I was more excited about what happened than ever. I’ll share why.
- I didn’t baptize a single child
- We baptized less kids at the all-church baptism since I’ve been at Gateway
- I talked about 15 kids out of getting baptized yesterday
After reading my list, you might think I was crazy. Nope, it was all very intentional. You may have read me talk about our Gateway Baptisms before.… Read the rest
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Heavy attendance?
Posted on 09. Jan, 2011 by Kenny.
Today beings our season of highest attendance here at Gateway. Although our highest non-holiday weekend every year is typically the third weekend in January, often times our highest attendance weekend is sometime in February or March.
What about for you? When does your attendance really pick up? Do you do anything different or special during this season that causes the heavy attendance? When attendance is high, is there anything you do differently in response  in order to handle the larger crowds or to manage follow up?… Read the rest
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Join Gateway for Imagine Christmas this year!
Posted on 23. Dec, 2010 by Kenny.
Last night we began our series of nine Christmas Eve services. Oh my, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more amazing Christmas production. Absolutely incredible. I actually didn’t realized until a few weeks ago that Imagine Christmas was a program that churches could purchase from Willow Creek and produce for their own Christmas services. I knew that it was originally written and produced by Willow Creek, but I thought we had a special deal because our Arts Director at Gateway was the guy who actually created Imagine Christmas when he was on staff at Willow. Very cool. I’ve been watching You Tube Videos where you can see various scenes of the production from churches all around the country from years past.… Read the rest
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Child Dedication: Stuff we are doing
Posted on 14. Nov, 2010 by Kenny.
Here at Gateway, we’ve been doing some cool stuff with Child Dedications for the past two years. If you have followed this blog for any amount of time, you will notice that I’ve written a lot about child dedication. However, I recognize that there are always new people, so I won’t assume everyone knows. To catch up on the process of refining Child Dedication services here at Gateway, click here (it’s the “child dedication” tag and should pull up any post I’ve written about Child Dedication).
So, here’s a little bit of what we’ve been doing over the years.
- We require a Prep for Child Dedication class.
- We place parents at tables with a prayer leader (the person who will pray with them the day of the dedication service).
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Illuminate: Review
Posted on 10. Nov, 2010 by Kenny.
As I said the other day, Illuminate was a total success. Since Saturday, I’ve been in pure recovery mode. I’m just now getting back to somewhat of a normal schedule, but I hope to be back to full steam next week.
However, I did want to reflect on what went well and what didn’t.
First of all, let me tell you what we did. We had about 215 people attend Illuminate. About 65 of them were my volunteers and 150 of them from other churches. Craig Jutila delivered two keynote talks and Michael Chanley, Sam Luce and Jonathan Cliff each led two breakouts. I charged other churches $25 per person to attend. Each conference participant got a conference notebook (padfolio) which included conference cards (information about the conference, Gateway Church, the speakers as well as promotional items from our sponsors) and a shiny new illuminateconference.tv pen.… Read the rest
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Illuminate hangover
Posted on 07. Nov, 2010 by Kenny.
Well, Illuminate is over. The best word to describe how I’m feeling right now is satisfied and thankful.
It was a great conference. Over and over and over again, people communicated to me that they were grateful for an opportunity like this. Many times people said that they totally didn’t expect what they got. They were blown away.
I’m satisfied because this is what we set out to do. We wanted to provide a “National Conference” experience that was local and affordable and this is what we did.
I’m thankful because my team did a great job pulling it off. It was a slim team, slimmer than I would have preferred. There was a small group of us that did a huge amount of work, but I’m grateful for everyone that helped.… Read the rest
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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
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