Tag Archives: Austin
Leadership Weekend Review
Posted on31. 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 on01. 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 on31. 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 on12. 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 on02. 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 on17. 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 on14. 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 on24. 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 on15. 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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Cross Timbers Revisited
Posted on19. Aug, 2008 by Kenny.
This past weekend I went back to North Fort Worth for a few days. Josh, my intern that worked (and lived) with me all summer wrapped up his time in Austin last Thursday. When we were planning the internship, I intentionally planned to take him to DFW and see a variety of multi-site churches. We planned to visit both Fellowship Church (the Grapevine and Fort Worth campus) as well as the Fort Worth campus of Life Church. These are some of the leading multi-site churches. However, the multi-site church that I knew best was Cross Timbers. Although I had been to DFW 3 or 4 times since being let go last November, I hadn’t actually visited the church since November.
I made arrangements to visit a few churches, have lunch with the Children’s Pastors at Cross Timbers and actually visit all the Cross Timbers campuses. We drove into town and had about 90 minutes to kill before our dinner appointment. Since the restaurant was in Southlake, we visited the Keller Campus of Cross Timbers. I expected the building to be locked down for the weekend, but I was surprised to find it open. I took Josh on an extended tour of the building that was once Anchor Church (the church that brought me to Texas) and then merged into Cross Timbers. Sara and I had a many happy memories in that church building. After taking out little tour, we let Titus go and hobble around the lobby (I say hobble only because he walks like a drunk man right now). I turned to Sara and said, “Isn’t it a little surreal to see our little boy walking around in this lobby?” It was while we were at this facility that we were childless for over a year and then went through the journey of two miscarriages. Sara began to tear up. I know this may sound bad, but there are some churches that I’ve worked at that I don’t totally “miss.” I was grateful for the experience and there are people we totally love, but we don’t completely miss the church. We do miss Anchor though, there is certainly still a pain in our hearts over that loss. So much has gotten muddied with mergers, new campus pastors, staff turnover, but many of those who were a part of Anchor are still around (actually, that’s who we were having dinner with a few minutes later).
On Saturday Josh and I took tours of both the Argyle Campus and Denton Campus. It was certainly refreshing to see some huge improvements that had been made over the past 9 months. The preschool hallway no longer looked like a dark and nasty pit. Ha! It looked bright and friendly. Good job Argyle. Afterward we went on up to the Denton campus. I had not seen the final product yet. Cross Timbers had just purchased the facility a few weeks before the layoff (one of the key reasons for the layoffs) and I never got to see what they did with the building. It looked fantastic. Miguel (the CP at Denton) has been doing a fantastic job with his new facilities.
It was fun visiting Cross Timbers this weekend. It was great to reminisce. There were a lot of memories formed there. It was also great to see improvements that had been made. It always feels great to see things done that you had either planned or hoped for. I can’t say it was also a little frustrating to see things that still hadn’t been done. Things that were promised initially, but never followed through. I did get to see a few people I hadn’t seen since November. For some of these people, it was so good to see them. For others I only have one word… awkward. Awkward only because of the nature of my departure. If my leaving had been under other circumstances, coming back for a visit would feel very different. There were a few people I really would have loved to have seen that I didn’t get a chance too. Maybe on my next visit. There were a few people that I didn’t see that I’m kinda glad I didn’t. Still a little awkward and still some things to continue to process in my heart… if you know what I mean.
Closing thoughts: Sara and I both felt it on Saturday. We love Keller and North Fort Worth. We could totally live there again some day.We had so much fun being there, eating at our old joints and hanging out with close friends. However, by the end of the day on Saturday, we were really ready to get home. Ha! That sounds kind of funny. We were anxious to get back to Austin… our home.
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